Through the station barriers, heading for work and then?

This week’s column in The Kerryman newspaper.

Michael Commane

Every weekday morning at 7.46 I observe people disgorge off a train at Dublin’s Docklands Rail Station. 

Two minutes earlier the station is almost empty, and then just as the doors open throngs of people pour on to the platform. They swipe their cards, the barriers open, and out they go. The noise from the barriers resounds across the small station.

Two, three hundred people, maybe more, on their way to work. Most of them are young, few over 60, usually two or three with bicycles. Maybe some worried about their jobs in the current precarious tech industry. I imagine all going to work, most of them in a quasi hurry. Many with earbuds, they are mostly white but I’ve noticed in recent days some have black earbuds. Wondering is the fashion changing?

Docklands Rail Station is in the heart of the high tech world; I sit there imagining many of them are high tech people. Wondering why Irish Rail now call us customers rather than passengers; I don’t like the change.

Five minutes later I take that same train in the opposite direction.

I’m there with my bicycle, far from being a high tech executive. Watching them all for those three or four minutes forces me back to my ever-asking question, what is it all about?

The old question; do we work to live or do we live to work? Such a question is an insult to those suffering around the world; the Ukrainian and Russian soldiers and their immediate families, the people of Gaza, the Iranians, and the close to billion people, who have not enough to eat.

Is it possible to survive in this word without love and job satisfaction? How can anyone stay home all-day-long doing nothing and yet what are we doing running about the place, intermittently thinking we are needed and important?

I’m told that God loves me but what exactly does that mean. Over the years I’ve heard so much talk about God and yes, I believe in God but how does that influence my life? I think I’m glad I’ve chosen the path I’ve chosen, at least some days I am. But I keep scratching my head and wondering. 

For the life of me I can never understand the institutional women and men, who sell their souls to whatever organisation they belong. We use the word apparatchik to demean people who play the party line, the party hack, the yes-people.

I’m back thinking of all those people rushing through the barriers at Docklands Rail Station every weekday morning. What’s going through their heads, what’s the meaning of their lives? What’s the meaning of my life?

Every time I hear those ticket barriers sound I’m thinking are we all simply apparatchiks.

It’s coming near the end of the school year and I’m worried how my students will do in their exams. I wish them well, I’ll miss them, hope they have great futures. I often look back at my former students, thrilled to see them happy and content. Maybe that’s the secret, staring me in the face, happiness and contentment. 

On Tuesday a tram driver reminded me, we come into the world without a worry. Wise words. I should take them on board.