A Quieter Life

I’ve taken on a life of solitude. Not in the traditional sense, I do speak to people occasionally and I haven’t taken any vows or signed any pacts, but as it stands much of my human interaction as of recent has been over the phone or telling people which line to sign their names on. Between bouts of office banter and friendly service well-wishes, I do a great deal of waiting. Waiting for jobs to come up, waiting to feel hungry, thirsty and waiting for an opportunity to have a short-lived conversation with a total stranger looking for a coffee shop, the post office, a public restroom or spare change. These consist of most of the human interaction I experience Monday through Friday. Now, you’d think that this kind of cold-turkey silence would evoke more outbursts of random conversation with those immediately available, however, in my case, it has caused the opposite effect and I have little interest in small-talk for banter’s sake. Instead I do plenty of thinking, pondering attempting to interpret and understand physical attitudes and their meanings. I try to read people’s gestures and walks, I read their shoes, their clothes and their passing odors. I read their eyes, their accessories, their urgency and their immediate companionship. I watch and I learn.

Now, you may see this as being unfair, I’m on the outside, I never speak to most of these people, I don’t know much about psychology, I don’t know much about philosophy, I don’t know much about biology, I don’t have any business doing this at all and it makes me an jackass for admitting to it. However, bare in mind that my intuition is rational, my investigations are based in scientific fact and previous years of study. How do I know you’re upset? Because you look upset, because your voice is labored and broken, because you look disheveled and beaten, because you’re upset. That kind of thinking has helped me develop a scientific method for understanding people and the more I watch, the more I learn, the more I can begin to hone the process to which I understand all things.

I was speaking with a friend about driving habits, about how we know how to navigate around other drivers, pedestrians, roads and such. It brought us to a conversation about instinct, about how we come to be able to assess certain situations and read the atmosphere, navigate. He chose the example of bicycling in urban areas. Now, this isn’t to marginalize mountain-biking which has it’s own follies and pitfalls of living danger, but this is the example he chose. The more you ride through urban areas, the more you become accustomed to the habits and actions of cars and pedestrians. (Pedestrians are impossible to read by the way, it may take the gentle breeze of a set of handle bars between their thighs to wake them out of their office slumber) You can read the gestures and intentions of cars, I can’t explain how, or why this is possible, but you can. Get into enough accidents, have enough close calls and your subconscious mind instinctually tells you when to put your risk to the wayside and push forward or when to slow down and see the situation from a distance, study what the possibilities were and the ramifications of your rushing into them. The same applies to social interactions and stations, I know people, I’ve known people my entire life, the more people I know and get to know, the wider my knowledge of people grows. I’m not psychic, and I’m not some great neurological scientist, I’m just someone who knows people and often times understands them, we all do, through sheer experience and instinct.

So how far is the gap between being able to understand and read the people you know and understand, and people you see passing on the street. Well, it’s vast, the truth is, you could attach archetypes of such and such type to each person you meet based on people you already know, but their paths to being themselves are ultimately different and thus they do not fit into existing archetypes that you create. (PS I effing hate Karl Jung and his own self-righteous categorizing of people so I refuse to take part in his pseudo-scientific, self-indulgent, masterbatory tripe) The only method you can hold true to are what you can see. The obvious that can be rationalized by sight and mind, it’s real because you saw it, not because you heard it, because many times people in public will tell stories or prostrate themselves for attention or to present a certain air of what sort of person they are. What you can see; are their shoes worn? They may spend a great deal of time on their feet. Are they dirty? Maybe they are shoes reserved for leisure activity and we worn in the mud, possibly for a run on a rainy day, maybe the dirty look is a fashionable alternative to clean, maybe they’re on their way to buy a brand new pair, maybe they can’t afford a new pair, maybe they’ve had the same pair since law school and are superstitious about discarding them. These are questions you ask, so what’s the right answer? They’re all right answers, and, they’re all wrong answers.

It is not my intention to explain how to read people’s minds, or to understand complete strangers with a simple glance. Rather, it’s to understand other people’s lives to some degree in order to navigate through your own. If you see a man who looks suspiciously nervous looking around, hugging himself occasionally and eyeing passersby cautiously, you know that meeting eyes with him would not be prudent or wise, as the likelihood of his taking offence or being suspicious to your stares would provoke a confrontation and possibly and altercation. If you see a couple holding hands down the street in the dead of night laughing raucously and making loud, inappropriate commentary about the end of their evening, you know that warning them about the atmosphere of slumbering folk and gentle ears would only serve to create a moment of dismissal and annoyance or simply a few feet of silence between your intercedence and their state of mind. And if you see an expensive-looking car barreling down the street with reckless abandon and a badge of battered fender nearly changing the landscape and aerodynamic design, be sure it’ll peel out, barrel ahead and hit something else, so make sure it isn’t you.