I am not a morning person. I do not enjoy running. I do not enjoy running in gym class first thing in the morning.

But it satisfies my requirements for graduation - I have no choice.

And when I began this particular morning, the thought was heavy on my mind. A knit hat disguised a head of wild, unkempt hair. I was exhausted. I was famished. I was late.

However, I was lucky enough to claim a coveted seat during what seems to be a most busy time of day for the trusty buses of the White Loop - during the bottom of a most unfortunate hour.

8 a.m.

With pity, I glanced at the slumped, sleeping student across from me.

He looked exactly how I felt. I struggled to sort my first coherent thoughts of the day.

The entire left side of my face is still imprinted with my pillow. Lovely.

How I'd love to return to the comfort of that pillow, and, ahh my warm bed, the pillar of all that is soothing ...

Who the hell is whistling?

The sound was incredibly annoying. I was not yet awake. It was a sound that I was not prepared to process. I wanted it to disappear. The bus stopped a couple of times, the whistling would not. I was baffled. If it would not stop, I would try to make sense of it.

I tuned into this discovery a little more. It complemented the music on the radio, which I hadn't even noticed at first. I looked about the bus in a frenzy; who is its owner? My gaze shifted to the front of the bus, my eyes finally settled on the driver.

Sure enough, it was him. And he was smiling. He was so incredibly ... happy. How is this possible? If anything, he should be furious. He has the right to be, anyway.

He obviously starts his day earlier than me. And his day, well, it's basically lap after lap around the frozen landscape, town, campus, back and forth, stopping at the same lights, yielding to the same signs.

Yet another glance confirmed it: He couldn't have been more pleasant, more approachable, if he tried. As I discarded my grumpiness to solve the mystery of his happiness, my demeanor began to soften and the weight of stress left my mind.

At some point in your college career, you'll find that lessons in the classroom permeate into other aspects of your life. My philosophy class is grasping an understanding of our duty as media consumers. We read "between frames" of comic strips and movie scenes using the information given to us, often without knowledge of our doing so. How do we understand the transition from day to night in a movie, when it isn't explicitly stated?

How do we comprehend the proceeding of a character's position in a movie theatre line? Context clues.

So, the driver. I studied this real-life scene for the answers to my questions. He switches from whistling to singing and back to whistling.

He and I are seeing the same things, on the same bus; I want to be happy, I want to see the same view as he does.

The radio station is definitely a very familiar genre, classic rock. The soft volume of the guitar solos provided warmth. He's got a sort of naturally confident emphasis with each movement. He greets everyone with an unabashedly merry "good morning."

I'm impressed.

Some things are probably meant to be left a mystery. It's more fun that way.

But I am not satisfied with this mystery. He is driving a bus full of grumpy, tired students stop to stop, he frequently has to remind us to make room for one another, and somehow his jubilant grin remains impervious.

I noticed his shoes: fun-looking boots. That's it, I decide. This was a sort of fictional context clue, produced in my mind. When he isn't at work, he drives around on a motorcycle. Few things embody true freedom more than the carefree abandonment of driving a bike.

If nothing else, it was a fun personalization of a dull uniform. So yeah, I was daydreaming, but it was better than the cold reality of all the odds stacked against me for the day. And it was only when I noticed his happiness that I was able to tune into my own.

Spiritual enlightenment, a good night's sleep, or maybe he just loves his job. Whatever the explanation is, the sight of his satisfied demeanor taught me something.

It was definitely better than floating between my own negative thoughts. I knew that I heard the most jubilant and victorious of whistles for the first time that morning.

It threw me out of my disgruntled mood. When I stepped off the bus that morning, I said thank you. Thank you for the ride, and for the whistling, and for the classic rock. I needed it and I didn't even know it.

Maybe I've got something to learn from the often unnoticed bus driver.

Maybe we all do.