Problem: Define a failure. Answer: Someone who is still riding a jeepney after 40.

By that definition, I shall be counted (small consolation) half a failure. Barring rain, strikes, rush-hour traffic, and the stark neccesity of having to get from here to there, fast, when my old, beat-up car breaks down — I enjoy jeepney-riding. It is an economical field lesson on Philippine culture, a compact refresher course on being Filipino.

Once, with an American friend, I was in the Danao marketplace to catch a ride back to Cebu City. The place was a veritable cockpit of jeepneys. Three jeepneys were competing for passengers, revving up their engines, furiously moving backward and forward, then backward again, in a game of creating the illusion that they were about ready to be on their way.

My friend and I committed ourselves to one of them. We were in no hurry. We watched with much amusement rival conductors jostling with each other to get the approaching passengers. Even the driver of the vehicle we had boarded would suddenly stop the jeepney right in the middle of the road, jump out of his seat, leaving the engine running, to run towards a prospective passenger he just sighted. Our jeepney would leave the marketplace, making as though we were finally on our way, only to turn around the block and bring us back to where we started. A young woman on board our jeepney, exasperated, abandoned us and boarded a rival jeepney that seemed like it was winning the contest. My friend, who was ejoying himself, remarked: ‘Sus, she has defected.’

After what seemed an hour, we were finally on our way. we had a full complement: four in front (the fourth perched on the left-hand side of the driver), twenty inside (with four seated back to back o tiny stools along the aisle), two on the running board, clinging, and the young conductor snugly perched on the spare tire attached to the jeepney’s rear.

We were, squeezed and jugged, a microcosm of Philippine society on which wheels. An ethnographer on board could very well have started taking down notes (though he obviously would have much of an elbow room to do it):

Note 1: Occupy as small a space as possible. The art lies in making yourself as small as possible and thus allow a little more space for the fellow next to you. Across from where I sat, my large American friend was gamely trying, without much success, to be as tiny as possible. He had remarked to me once how he felt guilty riding a jeepney, he took so much room. I felt rather sorry for him. He was an alien body in native space.

I was seated behind a woman who was not at all bad-looking. I could not but notice, out thighs were glued together and wisps of her hair kept getting in my face. I kept the composure of a eunuch. I must not send any hint, signal, of intention or agression. That’s note 2: Be a natural, anonymous body. Foreigners have remarked on the intimacy of a jeepney ride, man and woman squeezed in so tightly together they’re breathing on each other’s face. Yet, there is (as a rule) little sexuality in the ride. we’re just sexless, anonymous bodies carelessly packed side by side.

A jeepney ride along a rutted provincial road is not (as ads for travel by air, executive class, proclaim) “ultimate in comfort.” Contorted, jugged, assailed by dust and assorted smells, it calls for an exercise not in convenience but in transcendence. I noticed how the other passengers aboard our jeepney — obviously experienced riders — had quickly settled in for the ride. Their eyes closed, they all looked placid or asleep. Note 3: Meditate.

A jeepney ride, I’ve learned, can be intellectually rewarding. I remember the times I took quick trips to Carcar where I was doing fieldwork for a book I was writing. The 45-minute ride was a mental journey as well. I would close my eyes, will myself into thought about this or that problem in the book and, almost invariably, by the time I get off at the fork of the road leading to my research barrio of Valladolid (just outside the Carcar poblacion), I’d have pieced together in my mind something new. And I’d step out of the jeepney, feeling brighter than when I stepped in. And so Note 4: Remember that the journey is as much a part of the story as the arriving.

And what is the story of the jeepney ride itself? We spend so much time riding (Filipinos would take a jeepney, tricycle, or tartanilla to cover distances that can, in fact, be walked), riding a jeepney ( the quintessential Filipino vehicle, we are repeatedly told) must have something important to say about our collective soul.

What it says is not quite simple. As with other cultural practices, jeepney-riding is something changing and dynamic. The cultural rules are renegotiated and particularly in teh city, often flaunted. There is much in jeppney-riding that shows Filipino fellow-feeling, yet one is met, too, with many instances of a contrary ethos. There is endseat-hugging (passengers claiming the space closest to the exit so that new passengers have to squeeze through to get to the vacant spot up front) and then there is space squatting ( a real nuisance: passengers spreading their legs and claiming more space than tey should). As in life outside the jeepney, the Filipino character is more and more split between the fraternal and the opportunistic.

As with other cultural practices, too, jeepney-riding is double-sided. The Filipino’s capacity to absorb pain and discomfort with patience and good humor is something truly admirable. (Twenty-seven to a jeepney is not a bad ride. I have been in provincial jeepneys carrying even more, inside-outside, front-back, you can barely move a muscle,and your only consolation is the thought that, well, you may be participating in setting a world-record of sorts). Yet, such good-natured patience is also distinctly sad.

This is true of a social world larger than the jeepney. Social scientists have pointed to how Third-world economies, instead of expanding outwards, tend to “involute.” people live off increasingly smaller resources by overexploiting these resources (witness how only part of the chicken we have not yet speared with a barbecue stick are its feathers); by exploiting themselves (working harder for every diminishing returns); by elaborating work arrangements to turn a job that can be efficiently done by a single person into one that will be done by more (witness how a single jeepney can support shifts of drivers, conductors, washers, watchers, and dispatchers); or by turning an illusion of a job into a real job (witness the watch-your-car-boys). In such a culture of scarcity and poverty. “Filipino ingenuity” is often just the other side of self-exploitation and living at the margins.

Jeepney-riding — this emblem of being FIlipino — celebrates values of fraternity and fellow-feeling. It is our daily lesson in making do with less so there will be something left for the othe fellow too. Yet, it may be the emblem as well of the FIlipino in minimizing rather than maximizing mode. we make do with the little and end up settling for even less.

A well-known Filipino author, exasperated at the glorification of the jeepney, remarked that this antiquated contraption symbolizes some of the worst tendencies in the FIlipino: his bondage to the familiar and his refusal to take risks, to take that leap of imagination into something grander and bigger. One of the candidates in the current elections, playing around with images of isip-sisiw and isip-agila, ahs pretty much have the same message. They both have a point. Yet, we have seen how many who have turned agila have turned into predators as well. Might not the clinging to the homely and the familiar be a refusal to prey and be preyed upon?

And so the jeepney rides on. Watching all of us huddled together in that moving contraption — moving not so much from Danao to Cebu as to some commonfate — I could not help but feel not just a sense of sadness but of love and pride as well.