It has been roughly a month since my return from Africa, and since my return I have come to find new sorts of life in London. I don’t know if it was the circumstances around my holiday or a heightened sense of awareness, but either way I feel like recently I have developed an acute sense of awareness of the people around me, and the implications of life in such a vast place.
I feel as if I was so flooded with feelings and thoughts about things in my life and on this course that I am on, that it took a few weeks of floundering about to get a grip and start making some strides to have my life and heart be focused on the right things. I guess the strange thing about all these thoughts, is not so much what they are about, but rather the fact that after all the time I spend processing things, I come back to a point of realization that most of what I see doesn’t matter, and that love, people, and God are all that should be our focus (reference the “Golden Rule” of Christianity). I’ve heard the word simplexity used before…it’s not a word…but it captures the essence of it. Life really is simple…but we are really complex…all these things play out somewhere in the middle; I guess perhaps that’s what simplexity is.
I will say that of all my travels to so many places, there is only one constant I have found, that being people. The backdrops and landscapes of this world vary dramatically, as do the cultural anthropology and history of nations…but we as people are very much alike. To me fact is the most amazing thing, that despite being worlds apart and seemingly so varied that we are all in this together, passengers on a ship that for all intensive purposes appears to be sinking. The coexistence of our infinite uniqueness and haunting similarity seems impossible…yet its really quite true.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve just been puzzled by what to do with my thoughts about people…they have mostly been questions or observations, and they haven’t yet formed a course of action. I feel like I’ve opened a big puzzle and am just staring at some pieces…over time I trust these things find their place, but it does take time. I’ve kind of broken this down into the fragments I’ve gathered…not sure this makes any sense, but after thorough examination not much really does, I suspect that’s what faith is about.
The massiveness of life with masses
The other day walking out of a tube stop, I counted the number of people I passed on one side…I counted 50 in the standing lane, implying another 50 in the walking lane, and another 100 on the other escalator…200 people at a moment in a underground rail station…the stream constantly being recycled. It’s just so funny that so many people could be so close to each other and never interact, never engage. Irrespective of what you make of life in a big city you can’t escape the immensity of it all, there is nowhere to hide. To think that I was in proximity to something upwards of 1,000 individual people just on my way to the office is kind of crazy, yet I interact with next to none of them.
As I’ve been looking at the world around me, I’ve become very sensitive to the number of people I see each day, and the expressions they wear. It’s actually quite amazing when you look beyond someone and try to figure out what they’re thinking or how they feel, what’s on their mind, what’s on their heart. It’s also amazing how something as simple as a smile, can communicate so much and break down so many barriers. I’ve tried to make that my mission in commuting, to say nothing, yet to be different in the way I act towards strangers. The more I look around at these people the more my heart is full of compassion for the human race and how delicate and disastrous mess we are. I can’t really describe it but, in looking at the world around me I’m finding quite a mess, and can’t find much of a solution beyond opening my heart and loving as best I can.
Things we hear, things we understand
I hear a wide array of languages each day, of all of the words I hear that don’t make any sense, there are two things I’ve come to understand in every language. These are genuine happiness (via laughter) and true sadness (via tears). I’ve become quite good at not even paying mind to all the strange languages and conversations I hear in my life as a passerby, however these two morsels of humanity I cannot simply be pedestrian to.
A few weeks ago, there was an Italian girl sitting at the bar by herself having a phone conversation, and while I sat sipping my latte, I noticed that as her voice began to strain and her Italian words started to become more difficult to speak. The conversation continued as she spoke into her mobile phone, then finally she could fight it no more, and her eyes gave way to tears. The conversation I could neither understand nor hear in full, but the tears said plenty that I could understand. I don’t know what caused her pain, but I knew what I saw…I still wish I would have hugged her, and been able to tell her that it would be alright; I think we all need reassurance every now and again. It is in moments like these, that somehow I feel like there is a way for us break down the dumb barriers of comfort that we hide behind, I think the world could perhaps become a better place if we did…or maybe I would just feel better about it all.
Being a stranger
Part of my fear of a place as big as London for myself has become the comfort of anonymity and how easy it is to remain a stranger, to build up walls to hide behind, comfortable nests of false intimacy, and create a new life of being unknown and unknowable. I don’t feel that I’m doing that…or at least I’m taking pause to consider things in my life in this regard. Maybe the most concerning part about it all is how easy it is to do, how much easier this false type of life feels here; I suspect it all boils down to a choice of a way to live with your heart really exposed, really loving, really living, and letting the rest fall out where it may.
Broke
Watching the situation unfold in Egypt over the past weeks has been really moving to me, I hate seeing the violence and I hate seeing people in such disarray, but I keep on coming back to the similarity of us as humans and can’t help but think if the people I pass every day hurt any less…they hurt and struggle differently no doubt…but I’m not sure it’s any more or less, just different. It seems that the constant progress of the human race can’t escape the constant vacancy and need for something more, and not more in a material sense. I am beginning to see it regularly on the faces of just about everyone I see.
If progress or industrialization or becoming more civilized were the solution the western world would have long outgrown human dissatisfaction, yet it hasn’t. If money were the thing, then rich people would all be happy…some of the most miserable people I know just so happen to be the wealthiest. I’m pretty confident that there is no human solution to the human problem, there is nothing WE can do that solves the problems WE make for ourselves…for this we need grace, we need love, and we need it perfectly, not as from ourselves
What’s maybe most confusing to me in all this random babbling, is that all these things make me want to engage more. Despite the messes of the masses, the pain, the turmoil, the bitterness, and the cold-heartedness I do not feel it’s beyond repair, and maybe just maybe it just takes caring a little more about people, worrying a little less about my agenda, loving more genuinely, giving more of my away and trusting that Christ is enough to satisfy (really). That's a good deal in my book, maybe the whole world won’t be changed by my life, but perhaps that’s not my job…perhaps I’ve been given a random band of riff raff to love for a reason.
Being Unique
On the way to the airport Friday afternoon, I saw a news piece on a guy who collects photographs of snowflakes. He travels to cold places and catches the falling snow on his microscope slide and then photographs them. Snowflakes are amazing when you look at them in detail, and most incredible of all is that they are all entirely unique, not one like the other. They are all formed under different circumstances, and all take different shapes, they have the same limitations of thermo physics (as in, they melt when it’s too warm), yet they’re all snow…entirely unique individually, entirely the same collectively, no one flake more special than the other, but all special. Somewhere in all this I guess we have to find where we fit, both similarity and uniqueness, and I think we’re called to celebrate both. Never neglecting how different we really are, but always finding a middle ground.
The picture on the box of the puzzle
So after it’s all said and done, I think we are left with a quite a conundrum, somehow finding a way to make sense of all the pieces of the puzzle. I believe if we take our eyes off the pieces and start looking at what the pieces are supposed to become we may get some sense of clarity. With time, and work, and patience all the thousands of tiny pieces starts to have clarity. I know it’s hard to take those big leaps to start sorting out the crap on our own, but the funny thing is none of this stuff has significance, but rather, it’s just a medium for Christ to do significant things. Yet there is a certain clairvoyance about life that comes when you can shrug off the nonsense…job, home, wealth, beauty, the whole lot doesn’t mean a thing…loving people, loving God is all that matters, from there we can use the senselessness to start making sense of it all, ourselves, and maybe even each other.
So, there’s a bunch of mental vomit…good luck.
CP
