A Big, Small World

There are days, like Tuesday, when you sit in a window booth at a fast food restaurant you've sat at many times before on lunch breaks with the sweetheart. Talking about life, about jobs, about dreams - and then you watch the hundreds of cars that go by in the hour you sit talking, not recognizing a single face, and realize how big the world is, how each person in each car represents a life you know nothing about. People who have jobs, families, dreams, and scars - people who live without any awareness of your own being, and not because they don't want to always, but becuase they don't need to. Their lives go on without mine, and will continue to do so having never known me. Me, this person who gets so lost in myself sometimes. How can that be?

Cliff brought up a great point as we thought and talked about this (which I would have to say usually doesn't happen for me at places like Taco Bell, more often it's your airports and shopping malls that inspire an awareness of the great big world full of lots of very different people), that most people try to live there lives without really looking into the faces around them because they have to, to get by. It's like filtering media - if we really paid attention to every advertisement, every piece of news, every song, every television show, our lives would be too full. We have to be conscience of who we let in and don't, and yet still others, we even fail to notice at all.

Walking up to my office after he dropped me back off at work, I thought about my friends in Africa - people I knew for such brief short of time and yet so opened my eyes to a world I had never known, never seen. And there is still so much I don't know - so many faces I remember seeing walking, sitting, riding along the streetways - wondering what another Mzungu was doing with such wide eyes staring out of a car window. I miss that feeling of wanting to take everything, every life, every face, every story, every joy and pain these people had ever known because they were so very different from people in my own world (not literally, for of course we all inhabit this spinning ball of dirt).

Of course, it is so much more convenient and sometimes even a struggle just to open our blinders up enough to truly interact with the people we know, the people we see day after day. So many lives, and such a great big world - why should we look outside what we know?

But what of those other days when, not too much like Tuesay, you run into a person you met three years ago or find an old friend's blog by accident, or someone brings up another person in conversation, realizing they too, know that person? Those are moments that remind me that no matter how much we try to avoid it, our lives connect with the people around us - even if it's a face I recognize simply because it's the same person who walks by my office every day or the friendly barista who always seems to be working when I stop by a local coffee house to grab something to satisfy my desire for caffeine. Someone knows that person, and someone knows that person, and chances are - someone I know might know that person. Or, better yet, what if I took the time to know that person?

We are a sea of people to each other, often nameless and even faceless - but many times life surprises us and lands us on each other's figurative doorsteps - and I think that's pretty amazing.

I just think it's fantastic that we are humans, capable of living such secluded lives and yet we cannot escape that from which we are all connected to... humanity. How to stay mindful of this, though, is a puzzle I don't feel quite ready to put together - for now, I'm just content to find my place and occasionally make a new friend or run into an old one in a big, small world.