Consider this. You were at the cashier's check out register. You noted immediately from the moment you laid the items down on the conveyor that it was not going to be a friendly encounter. The cashier didn't make eye contact, and she was almost manhandling the merchandise. You try to make small talk. It's an effort that usually works because that's the least anyone can do to lighten someone's day who obviously had been on her feet all day. No response of any kind. If anything her face looked even more dour. When she handed your receipt she didn't even look at you. No "have a nice day"; instead, you were dismissed as if you were an inconvenience. You walked back to your car wondering, "Was it me or that was the worst service experience ever?" You wanted to forget the whole thing but then ...
You wonder. You just had to. She was having a bad day, obviously. Did she just break up with her boyfriend? Was the store manager particularly harsh on her today? Or, was she a single mother worrying about her three year old at the day care because the kid had a bit of sniffles and clearly did not want to be left there. You just knew there had to be many reasons why the cashier behaved the way she did. But you don't know. You just can't know, could you?
Forget the mysteries of the universe. You might have a crack at understanding the "inverted yield curve" in the world of finance or you had recently acquired a working knowledge of general astronomy but finding out the answer to what was bothering that cashier is something you can't know. Well, you could have tried if you went back there and talked to her. But you will not. You should not. And even if you did, you can never be too certain she will tell you the truth. So, you just have to accept that it is another unknowable mystery.
Now, on your drive home you were stopped at an intersection. Waiting for the red light to turn, you looked to your right. Under the awning of a bus stop stood another youngish woman with a little girl next to her. The girl was looking up at the one whom you assumed was her mother. The woman was crying uncontrollably, shoulders shuddering. There was a couple next to them who were quite oblivious to the woman and the little girl. The couple were giggling over whatever it was on the guy's smart phone. The light turned, instinctively you took your foot off the brake and onto the accelerator and off you went. Like most every driver, you drove with very little thought to what used to be a very complicated, synchronized manipulation of muscle and machine when you were first learning to drive. Now it was like riding a bike. Your mind is able to preoccupy with other things while simultaneously maneuvering a 2500-pound vehicle on a busy street. But again, the mind just had to engage on that now pressing other "something else".
The cashier's problem was now replaced by the plight of the woman and the little girl. You can't shake off the image of the girl looking up at the woman whose tears you imagined had to be flowing still. And you remember she didn't even have a tissue in her hands. The image of the giggling couple kept intruding but surely the crying woman and the girl proved indelible. This time the mystery is definitely unknowable. You're now 6 blocks away from the intersection, the bus must have already come to pick them up. Another mystery unsolved.
In that short span of time the human experience once again reigned supreme over everything else that is going on in the universe. 7 billion people means an almost infinitely complex exchanges that no algorithm can ever predict or evaluate. For example, why people do what they do, or behave the way they do, or say what they say. Otherwise, timing the stock market, predicting election results, or understanding the mind of a teenager, would by now be an exact science.
Well, it comes down to this. Yes, the whole world would now seem like a smaller place than it used to be. Though the globe's circumference has remained the same, there are now close to 7 billion people alive. The number was 1.6 billion in 1900. A century and a half before that, in 1750, it was only 700 million. Modern technology in communication and social media had created this illusion of a much smaller world, yet we seem far apart from each other. But we should realize that the entire human experience is still mostly local even when the entire world is within a screen shot of a video-conference, a 24-hour news cycle, or a culture now constantly being altered by You tube, Facebook, selfies, and the pervasive ubiquity of the phone camera in ultra-high 1080 pixels of resolution.
How are we to alleviate the descending disorder of our societies when the internet is now not so much a net as it is a barrier to what used to be a lot more genuine human experience? Are we going to get to the point when indeed we just don't know, we just can't know much about those within our neighborhood or those within touching distance of our everyday life.
The two extreme examples above are clearly beyond what is allowed in our human experience to assuage. Even if we tried. But there are within those stories the hope that compassion can be revived or re-strengthened, and sympathy for the cashier's travails can still be had or if the couple at the bus stop could have paid just a tiny tad more attention to the mother and daughter instead of quenching their insatiable taste for social media and cheap humor.
The tools for communication may be instant and all encompassing but are we really communicating?
Well there is something we can do. The following is a real story. It is real because I was in it.
A little over eight weeks ago I switched gym location. Same chain but is four miles farther and decades newer. It has a salt water pool instead of the standard chlorinated one, 25 yards long instead of 25 meters. This meant swimming an extra two laps (20 to 22) for a 1000 meter swim. But the more significant difference was that none of those I had become friends with at the old gym will be there, let alone familiar faces I had gotten used to and mine to them.
Another huge change and the one that really mattered is the zero wait time to get a lane. The pool is hardly a busy section of the gym. After just a few days of going, there are just a handful of regulars that come at about the same mid-afternoon hours. And the pool, with or without swimmers is as quiet as "an undiscovered tomb" (to quote Henry Higgins from My Fair Lady). Folks were not talking to each other, to my dismay, but it was to be that for the first days I've been coming. So, there was one big (and I mean big) tall Caucasian (Swimmer A, or Sa, for short), another who swims with a snorkel, web-gloves and fins, and special-looking goggles (Swimmer B, Sb), a petite middle age lady who was clearly a high school librarian (Swimmer C, Sc). Everyone did his or her swim quietly, no one talking to anyone.
Like most of you, the reader, I had opinions about each one of them, and I'm sure they too had some about me. So, each of us just don't know and can't know of each other. The idle mind got busy. Sa does not look old enough to be retired, so he must work nights. Sb must be a "new" swimmer or the snorkel makes breathing a lot easier and webbed gloves and fins are simply reasonable swimming aids. Sc must be a housewife, to make the particular swim hours.
I was wrong in all three of my opinions. It just shows again that "we just don't know, we just can't know".
One afternoon, I was walking along the length of the pool to set my gym bag on a bench at the other end. I was jolted to hear someone who was already in the water greet me good afternoon in Filipino! It was Sa (the Caucasian). Smiling he said, when I turned, "I'm no Sherlock Holmes but your shirt says about a Philippine Island resort on it and, forgive me, but you do look Filipino". He, as a young man years ago, did missionary work in the Philippines and had become quite good with the language though not too well now from disuse. That broke the ice and the stillness that permeated the pool before that. It didn't take long for the melting ice to get conversations flowing among the regulars.
I introduced myself to Sa and I introduced him to Sb and Sc can't be left out because she had been telling her friends that she'd been swimming among the "boys club" who didn't speak to each other.
Sa is currently in between jobs, leaving town from time to time for interviews out of state although he prefers to stay in Texas. His special HR skills and the position he had gotten used to requires special employment match up. Sb owns a Tex-Mex restaurant that he named after his wife who actually manages the place. He was originally from Columbia married to one from El Salvador who at that time when he met her already had a young son. Sc is no longer married but has a daughter who now lives in San Diego with a two year old. Sc does work from home as a writer for the company Human resources department (writing newsletters and decoding government, Federal and State, regulatory rules, etc.). Just like that we all got to know each other.
Sb's son graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy and so did my eldest. Sb started swimming at the behest of his cardiologist and wife, in that order, so as to prevent another heart attack. He has some kidney issues too but what is most laudable is that he is staying with the regimen. Sc is struggling with her swimming so I gave her pointers when she asked and she is clearly improving out of sheer determination. Sa, aside from his employment potential updates, also talks about his personal campaign to lose weight. It now looks like he may have to move to Philadelphia.
And so the quiet pool is no longer so. And we all got to know each other without the aid of social media or electronic gadgets. That's how it used to be. But sadly, even confined to the inside perimeter of a waiting area, as in the doctor's office, or at the auto shop, or anywhere people are in close proximity to one another, conversing is no longer the natural conduit for social interchange because almost everyone is hunched over a world contained within the palm of each other's hands - the cell phone.
Next time, try a person-to-person conversation. There is naturally the risk of a non-response but you'd be amazed at what you could gain, or what you enable someone to gain. It is a win-win when we get to know and we can know when two sides are willing to no longer settle for, "We just don't know, we just can't know".
Well, it comes down to this. Yes, the whole world would now seem like a smaller place than it used to be. Though the globe's circumference has remained the same, there are now close to 7 billion people alive. The number was 1.6 billion in 1900. A century and a half before that, in 1750, it was only 700 million. Modern technology in communication and social media had created this illusion of a much smaller world, yet we seem far apart from each other. But we should realize that the entire human experience is still mostly local even when the entire world is within a screen shot of a video-conference, a 24-hour news cycle, or a culture now constantly being altered by You tube, Facebook, selfies, and the pervasive ubiquity of the phone camera in ultra-high 1080 pixels of resolution.
How are we to alleviate the descending disorder of our societies when the internet is now not so much a net as it is a barrier to what used to be a lot more genuine human experience? Are we going to get to the point when indeed we just don't know, we just can't know much about those within our neighborhood or those within touching distance of our everyday life.
The two extreme examples above are clearly beyond what is allowed in our human experience to assuage. Even if we tried. But there are within those stories the hope that compassion can be revived or re-strengthened, and sympathy for the cashier's travails can still be had or if the couple at the bus stop could have paid just a tiny tad more attention to the mother and daughter instead of quenching their insatiable taste for social media and cheap humor.
The tools for communication may be instant and all encompassing but are we really communicating?
Well there is something we can do. The following is a real story. It is real because I was in it.
A little over eight weeks ago I switched gym location. Same chain but is four miles farther and decades newer. It has a salt water pool instead of the standard chlorinated one, 25 yards long instead of 25 meters. This meant swimming an extra two laps (20 to 22) for a 1000 meter swim. But the more significant difference was that none of those I had become friends with at the old gym will be there, let alone familiar faces I had gotten used to and mine to them.
Another huge change and the one that really mattered is the zero wait time to get a lane. The pool is hardly a busy section of the gym. After just a few days of going, there are just a handful of regulars that come at about the same mid-afternoon hours. And the pool, with or without swimmers is as quiet as "an undiscovered tomb" (to quote Henry Higgins from My Fair Lady). Folks were not talking to each other, to my dismay, but it was to be that for the first days I've been coming. So, there was one big (and I mean big) tall Caucasian (Swimmer A, or Sa, for short), another who swims with a snorkel, web-gloves and fins, and special-looking goggles (Swimmer B, Sb), a petite middle age lady who was clearly a high school librarian (Swimmer C, Sc). Everyone did his or her swim quietly, no one talking to anyone.
Like most of you, the reader, I had opinions about each one of them, and I'm sure they too had some about me. So, each of us just don't know and can't know of each other. The idle mind got busy. Sa does not look old enough to be retired, so he must work nights. Sb must be a "new" swimmer or the snorkel makes breathing a lot easier and webbed gloves and fins are simply reasonable swimming aids. Sc must be a housewife, to make the particular swim hours.
I was wrong in all three of my opinions. It just shows again that "we just don't know, we just can't know".
One afternoon, I was walking along the length of the pool to set my gym bag on a bench at the other end. I was jolted to hear someone who was already in the water greet me good afternoon in Filipino! It was Sa (the Caucasian). Smiling he said, when I turned, "I'm no Sherlock Holmes but your shirt says about a Philippine Island resort on it and, forgive me, but you do look Filipino". He, as a young man years ago, did missionary work in the Philippines and had become quite good with the language though not too well now from disuse. That broke the ice and the stillness that permeated the pool before that. It didn't take long for the melting ice to get conversations flowing among the regulars.
I introduced myself to Sa and I introduced him to Sb and Sc can't be left out because she had been telling her friends that she'd been swimming among the "boys club" who didn't speak to each other.
Sa is currently in between jobs, leaving town from time to time for interviews out of state although he prefers to stay in Texas. His special HR skills and the position he had gotten used to requires special employment match up. Sb owns a Tex-Mex restaurant that he named after his wife who actually manages the place. He was originally from Columbia married to one from El Salvador who at that time when he met her already had a young son. Sc is no longer married but has a daughter who now lives in San Diego with a two year old. Sc does work from home as a writer for the company Human resources department (writing newsletters and decoding government, Federal and State, regulatory rules, etc.). Just like that we all got to know each other.
Sb's son graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy and so did my eldest. Sb started swimming at the behest of his cardiologist and wife, in that order, so as to prevent another heart attack. He has some kidney issues too but what is most laudable is that he is staying with the regimen. Sc is struggling with her swimming so I gave her pointers when she asked and she is clearly improving out of sheer determination. Sa, aside from his employment potential updates, also talks about his personal campaign to lose weight. It now looks like he may have to move to Philadelphia.
And so the quiet pool is no longer so. And we all got to know each other without the aid of social media or electronic gadgets. That's how it used to be. But sadly, even confined to the inside perimeter of a waiting area, as in the doctor's office, or at the auto shop, or anywhere people are in close proximity to one another, conversing is no longer the natural conduit for social interchange because almost everyone is hunched over a world contained within the palm of each other's hands - the cell phone.
Next time, try a person-to-person conversation. There is naturally the risk of a non-response but you'd be amazed at what you could gain, or what you enable someone to gain. It is a win-win when we get to know and we can know when two sides are willing to no longer settle for, "We just don't know, we just can't know".
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