This is #34 in a series of month-end reflections on the state of the world, and other things that come to mind, as I walk, hike, and explore in my local community.
our neighbourhood café after dark; my own photo, photoshopped
So this body is walking around the neighbourhood, apparently, taking advantage of the fact that its long bout with plantar fasciitis seems to have mostly ended. This self remains a hostage to this body, which does what it does irrespective of what this self reasons to be the most appropriate course of action, leaving this self with nothing to do but rationalize what was done. And this self remains also a perpetual hostage of its feeble and hopelessly flawed internal model of ‘reality’, the prosthetic veil through which it unhappily views and judges everything. With such a handicap, it is amazing that the human species has endured as long as it has without killing itself off. At least, that is what this self tells itself, now.
Two teens cuddle on the sofa in the café, half-draped across each other. Their eyes dart back and forth between their screens and each other’s eyes. Their faces are animated, passionate. They hold onto each other almost desperately, at least one hand constantly in touch with each other’s body. They speak, but the words they say are incoherent. They don’t have to make sense. The tone, the touch, the expression is all that matters.
Of course, nothing about this is conscious. The chemicals in their bodies are compelling this conditioned behaviour exactly as they drive the mating behaviours of wild creatures. Exactly as they condition and drive all our behaviours.
The objective of this particular evolved conditioning, it would seem, is to make the couple oblivious to everything except the task at hand — the business of procreation. And then, if that task succeeds, the chemical mix will shift to compel parenting behaviours. They could not choose to do otherwise, any more than they could choose not to breathe. They think they ‘know’ each other, and are ‘known’ by each other in that unprecedented way conveyed by our most anthemic love songs. But there is no ‘knowing’ another person. They are each, as we all are, always, utterly alone, and utterly unknown.
Three guys half-hidden in the bushes, on the windowless, doorless side of the supermarket, the part where stuff is stored before shelving, are shooting up, or ingesting, street drugs. They are looking out for each other, kind of, casting furtive glances out toward the street before returning to the task at hand. One of them is crouched over, gently rocking. One of the others is fiddling with what looks like a kind of torch. The third guy looks over toward me; when I keep walking he turns away, sits down under one of the bushes.
The people walking by, giving them a wide berth, are, just like me, going around the corner to the supermarket entrance, driven by the same chemical conditioning to harvest what is needed to survive and feel good as the men in the bushes. It seems the only differences between us are the circumstances that have led up to our respective conditioned behaviours. We judge; we ‘make sense’. We think we know what is going on, and why it is going on, and that we have some control over what is going on. But we know and control nothing. Each body is just acting out its conditioning. Each brain is furiously rationalizing that conditioning as ‘its’ decision, when it is not. Apparently, that’s all our big, much-vaunted human brains can do.
As I look out the window of the café, a couple pushing a baby carriage stops to chat with someone sitting at an outside table. Coming up the side street, a woman pushing another baby carriage stops as she gets near the intersection to do something on her cell phone. For a long moment, the two carriages sit, almost face to face, their tiny passengers staring at each other with astonished looks. Their attention is riveted on each other.
There is some evidence that babies, like wild creatures, have no sense of themselves as separate beings, and no sense of anything else as being a separate ‘thing’ either. That doesn’t mean that babies and non-human animals can’t learn conditioned behaviours that enable them to respond very effectively and instinctively to their situations and environments. They have no need for ‘selves’, and no need to ‘make sense’ of things. The babies look at each other as they might look at wild creatures, and as young wild creatures might look at them and at each other — with conditioned curiosity, an evolutionarily advantageous learning tool. “What is that thing? Let me feel, touch, sniff, explore it. Bring it closer.”
There is a young man sitting in the corner of the café. He has headphones on, and nods occasionally, most likely participating in a webinar. His hands are positioned so they can’t be seen on the screen’s camera, and he’s folding paper into different shapes. First, he produces a paper boat. Then, taking longer, he carefully constructs a paper airplane, taking pains to make the folds crisp and precise. A few minutes later, the webinar apparently over, he puts his two constructions on the windowsill beside him, packs up, and leaves the café.
A few moments after that, a woman with a young boy in tow comes into the café. They sit at the table next to where the paper-constructor was sitting. The woman goes to the counter to place her order. The boy looks around, spots the paper constructions on the windowsill, and stares around the room. He then races over to the windowsill and picks up the paper airplane. He looks at it for a moment, and then, choosing his destination, an unoccupied table four tables away across the room, carefully launches it. It glides perfectly, and several people turn as they see it whizzing past them, landing faultlessly on the unoccupied table. The boy, seeing it land, quickly sits and puts his head on the table, hiding his face. And then suddenly there is a little round of applause from some of the café customers. The boy glances up in surprise, and sees several people looking at him. He jumps up, bows, and sits down again. His mother, her back turned to the action, returns to the table looking at him with a frown on her face and says “What was that about?” The boy shrugs. A moment later, a departing customer picks up the airplane and, with a wink, quietly hands it back to the boy.
Outside, a small dog is taking its people for a walk. The dog is paying attention to everything, sniffing, staring, darting sideways at the slightest noise or disturbance. Its people, like most of the people walking along the street, are not paying much attention to anything. Some of the people on the street are talking on phones or looking at tiny screens, or chatting with each other, not watching what is coming toward them, largely oblivious to upcoming curbs and other obstacles. Other people on the street are walking more quickly, looking straight ahead, with that “I know where I’m going” expression. It’s as if they’re willing themselves to not be there at all, to jump forward to their destination and skip the annoyance and exposure of the journey.
Two 20- or 30-something guys wearing dark sunglasses amble along the street together, walking deliberately slowly, taking up much of the sidewalk. They have that practiced “I’m somebody” strut. They are paying attention, but only to being-paid-attention-to. Unlike the fast walkers, they want to be noticed, but they also want to not appear to want to be noticed. It’s all street theatre, especially when they are nearly run over by a woman staring at her cell phone, disrupting all their performances.
Three young teenage women walk by them all. They are toting shopping bags, and one of them, wearing a very short, loose skirt, has her hand firmly smoothing and holding the hem of the skirt down as they walk. Perhaps like all of us, it seems she’s not sure what she wants, and whether and by whom she wants to be noticed. One of the guys in sunglasses, still recovering from the collision with the distracted woman, pivots involuntarily when he catches sight of the teenager in the short skirt, nearly causing another collision. He looks annoyed; his cover is totally blown.
John Green (drawing on Amy Rosenthal’s work) wrote that so much of our worldview, and the course of our lives, is determined by what we pay attention to. He said ‘by what we choose to pay attention to’, but of course we have no choice. Even if we unsubscribe, or turn off the screen, that is as much conditioned behaviour as moaning at our personalized doom scroll. Everything we do and believe is conditioned by others’ behaviour, so in that sense John is exactly right: the ‘others’ that we are exposed to, face to face or in our viewing and reading and listening, condition us and hence determine what we subsequently think and believe and do.
In a world of social bubbles, few of us are exposed to, or ever pay attention to, people who live or think much differently from how we have been conditioned to live and think. Even worse, we are entrained to dismiss those ‘others’ who say or do anything (or are even alleged to have done something) that we disagree with or don’t understand. Even when we are exposed to them, we don’t pay attention to them. They must be wrong, misled, stupid, evil, or insane. Scroll past, change the channel, walk away.
The little dog knows better — it knows everything is wondrous, interesting, worth paying attention to. For most of its life, it’s not clamouring for attention from ‘others’. Unlike we humans with our cell phones and sunglasses and carefully chosen clothing, it is not the centre of its own universe.
Two kids, probably on their way home from high school judging from their outfits, stop into the café for iced lattes. The boy reaches into his backpack and draws out a small stuffie (plush toy) which he presents, a bit awkwardly, to the girl. Her reaction is nothing short of a swoon. She covers her mouth in delight. She laughs and smiles and hugs him. When he goes to place their order, she pins it to her pack and takes dozens of selfies of herself with her new gift and the pack. She looks so happy!
My new adopted community is very multicultural, but there are a few things that many of these cultures seem to have in common that aren’t part of what might be called established ‘Canadian’ culture. One is an almost exaggerated, but absolutely genuine, politeness to strangers. (I would now never think of not acknowledging my co-passengers in our apartment building’s elevator, and wishing them a good day as each arrives at their floor.)
But a second is the important ritual of bringing gifts to almost any occasion, no matter how informal. The gifts are mostly simple and often handmade, and elegantly but not ostentatiously wrapped. There are entire, separate rituals that govern how these gifts are presented and how they are accepted (partial hint: give and receive gifts with both hands). Gift-giving is an absolutely lovely custom, and I’m hoping it rubs off on the rest of us. Such a simple way to say what we can never hear too often: I see you; I appreciate you. This is for you.
I walk towards the lake, and in the park I just stop, and sit, and look around. It’s so easy not to notice; to turn one’s attention inward instead, and live inside one’s head. Too often, it feels safer, too, and more reassuring. No one gives us their complete attention the way we give it to ourselves.
As I watch the people and the more-than-human creatures — in the café, on the streets, in the park — I am struck by how humans, thanks to our meddling ‘selves’, process our ‘aloneness’ differently from how other animals seem to. Only for us, I think, is there ever a sense of being lonely. Other creatures are social, of course, and are conditioned to enjoy (and may depend heavily on) the company of their ‘tribe’. They may even justifiably fear being isolated from their tribe. But I think they are connected to all life on the planet, and are integrally a part of their home ecosystems, in a way that humans have forgotten. You can’t be lonely when you’re always connected to, and part of, everything else.
We humans can only console our fragile, disconnected, befuddled selves with the knowledge that these selves actually have it all wrong: In truth, there is no ‘one’ to be alone. If we could only see past the false, separating veil of the self, and pay attention to what is ‘outside’, I suppose that would be obvious.
