An Airport: Alone in an Assembly
I’m at the Sacramento airport right now, waiting … which seems to be what everybody else is doing as well. Uncomfortably, people sit alone, while surrounded by other people who are also alone. I don’t know the history of our culture, but I’m curious as to when it became rude to prod a perfectly good stranger into conversation. Although here I am with a laptop in my eyes, an iPod in my ears, sitting saturated in my own controlled senses.
Still, the airport is a decent place to people watch. Even if you aren’t engaged with one another, you can still watch and wonder, not receiving conversation but still enlightened by presence alone.
Is that poetic? “Presence alone”?
I smile! Across are two strangers smiling in each other’s faces. One can feel a metaphysical connection emanating from them, inspiring the rest of us, if only minutely, to appreciate another. Or perhaps that is my own desire to connect, coming out from my eyes. Ironic then, that I should “talk” in blog than face to face.
When I look up they are gone, and that is the end.
Tagged as airport, apathy, connection, disconnect, love, people, Philosophy, Poetry + Categorized as Philosophy, Poetry
yeah, I hope I’ll be posting some stuff soon. The problem is that I haven’t written all summer, so anything I write as of right now will be shit. Maybe I’ll post some old stuff though? I might create a seperate blog for the writing. It’ll probably be easier to keep up with. I’ll let you know. =)
Oh, one more thing, haha. I just read the post and meant to comment on it as well. Oops…it kinda reminds me of Fight Club. If you haven’t seen it you should. Him and his “single serving friends.” It’s some great stuff.
It is! ” The little bottles of single serving shampoo, single serving soap. These were single serving friends.” A friend lent me the book but I never read it. :/
is it? “rude”?
one thing to consider is that we’re constantly surrounded by so many more people than our minds evolved to deal with. we’re great with understanding small-group dynamics, and “reading” people in the context of that (tone of voice, body language, etc) but we can’t know a tiny fraction of the people we come into contact with every day, and have to sort of choose who to focus on. otherwise we’d be overwhelmed all the time
Good point. Related, we do have a terrible fear culture (don’t talk to strangers!) which supports the erroneous notion that we can always be safe (at the cost of friendliness, et. all)
watching people in airports is so interesting. just to sit there and think about how funny the human race is. thousands of people together, a huge amount of them alone, and no one talks to each other…