Passengers on the Bus

Suppose there is a bus and you are the driver. On this bus weʼve got a bunch of

passengers.  Some of them are scary, and they are dressed up in black

leather jackets and they have switchblade knives. What happens is that you are driving

along and the passengers start threatening you, telling you what you have to do, where

you have to go. “Youʼve got to turn left, “ “Youʼve got to turn right” and so on. The threat

they have over you is that if you donʼt do what they say, theyʼre going to come up front

from the back of the bus.

Itʼs as if youʼve made deals with these passengers, and the deal is, “You sit in the

back of the bus and scrunch down so that I canʼt see you very often, and Iʼll do what you

say pretty much.” Now what if one day you get tired of that and say, “I donʼt like this!  Iʼm

going to throw those people off the bus!” You stop the bus and you go back to deal with

the mean-looking passengers. But you notice that the very first thing you had to do was

stop. Notice now, youʼre not driving anywhere, youʼre just dealing with the passengers.

And theyʼre very strong. They donʼt intend to leave, and you wrestle with them, but it just

doesnʼt turn out very successfully.

Eventually, you go back to placating the passengers, trying to get them to sit way

in the back again where you canʼt see them. The problem with this deal is that you do

what they ask in exchange for getting them out of your life.  Pretty soon they donʼt even

have to tell you, “Turn left” — you know as soon as you get near a left turn that the

passengers are going to crawl all over you. In time you may get good enough that you

can almost pretend that theyʼre pretty much not on the bus at all. You just tell yourself

that left is the only direction you want to turn. However, when they eventually do show

up, itʼs with the added power of the deals that youʼve made with them in the past.

Now the trick about the whole thing is that the power the passengers have over

you is 100% based on this: “If you donʼt do what we say, weʼre coming up and weʼre

making you look at us.” Thatʼs it. Itʼs true that when they come up front they look as if

they could do a whole lot more. They have knives, chains, and so forth. It looks as

though you could be destroyed. The driver (you) has control of the bus, but you trade off

the control in these secret deals with the passengers. In other words, by trying to get

control, youʼve actually given up control. Now notice that even though your passengers

claim they can destroy you if you donʼt turn left, it has never actually happened. These

passengers canʼt make you do something against your will!