Alone in a crowd

Back when I worked in downtown Chicago I would take the train to work every day. It was actually a rather nice way to commute. Drove ten or fifteen minutes to the train station and then had around a thirty minute train ride downtown followed by a ten or fifteen minute walk to my office. It sounds like a horribly long commute and I guess from the time I left my office to the time I actually got home was probably an hour and a half. It just didn’t seem that long at the time because I wasn’t really doing anything. Or at least, nothing of importance.

I was one of those who would sit on the train and read. I can’t even think about how many books I plowed through on all of those trips. I never read anything to difficult on those trips (it just isn’t the right venue for classical literature) but I read constantly. That and listen to music on my discman. This was pre iPod and really pre ubiquitous cel phones. I wasn’t carrying one at the time so it was really just me and my thoughts. It was like having an hour of meditation time in your schedule every day; if a noisy, crowded train car was considered a perfectly valid spot for meditation.

What struck me most is how everyone was a creature of habit in their own world. You rode the train with the same people every day and we each chose our own individual train car to sit in. Leaving work I would always sit near the engine on the top level of the car. This gave me my own seat even if it was less comfortable and noisier up there. After a day in the office I just didn’t want to have to share a seat with a stranger. I still remember the woman who sat on the other side of the car from me. I don’t think we ever spoke a word to each other but we knew each other. We both just sat down in our seats after work and watched what everyone else was doing.

I don’t know if that is strange or not, knowing someone without actually knowing them. It’s probably a sad statement on the world. No matter what anyone states we are all living in our own little worlds and most of the time we don’t have our world intersect with someone else’s. When I was grocery shopping this afternoon (yes, unemployment allows me to do that on a Friday) I don’t know if I really noticed anyone else around me. I’m not talking about starting a conversation I mean really noticing and acknowledging their existence. No one did it to me either. We were all just doing our thing, trying to stay out of each others way.

There is a quote in Waking Life about not wanting to be an ant. That’s what being on the train was like. We were all ants in our little ant world waving our antenna but mainly trying our best not to get stepped on. I hope as I’ve gotten older that I’ve tried to break that habit. I don’t want to be an ant and it really bothers me that I occasionally view others like ants. The world is too interesting a place to let that happen.