Do we, if ever, see people fully?

We are anxious and absurd people. There’s a consistent theme of anticipation for people at my age: grades, university, love (?), health, death. This theme is definitely transgenerational but the momentum is quicker for us, and we are always somehow falling behind because the next milestone is here already. Your childhood friends began university a year before you? That’s nothing. You’re not where you think you deserve to be? That’s God’s plan — a hopeful script that we perform terrified in the hopes to win gold for at the end, but we just won’t know.

My favourite book, Anxious People, quotes:

God cannot save you from knives and stones dear, that is why we are here - to save each other.

And through this phase of losing sight of oneself, we ironically gain the most clarity about where we stand on multiple fronts. Friendships are reevaluated under the guise of wanting to be the average of your five closest friends (and you just have to remind yourself that you should also be on their top five list, too). Family is tested as a see-saw between burdening and saving you except you want completely control over your destiny and life choices at this point in time. Academics are, well… I don’t think this has ever come under scrutiny for me, but I have observed people let go of their close value of learning and wanting to intellectually level up. Judgments follow, and so does sympathy and acceptance because we now believe that to each their own choices so we are self-righteous. It is always so easy to declare that people are idiots and assholes, but we forget how idiotically arduous being human is.

That’s the thing, though. Are we really observing the subtleties in people’s lives? Do we genuinely care to genuinely ponder? Sorry, I mean “sonder” because social media has romanticised this “art of noticing”.

Right now, we are distracted. I sure am, writing this. I hold a belief that to truly notice something or someone carefully is such an important form of respect. At our cores, we function not because of having people but because of the perceived respect between us and these people. Modern-day nicety, corporate etiquette, and the “just right” amount of political correctness in conversation all fall under the category of us wanting respect. This includes giving respect because of the teeny, tiny expectation of it being returned. So, do we respect out of sincerity or is it all a farce to get by in life. Latter surely…

You might be a red-haired person in a blue-black puffed coat clutching on to flowers or balloons (depending on the occasion), and you might be timidly yellow gulping as you stand in the vividly coloured train station. And then you will realise that you’re just an anxious sketch that exists on a piece of paper and it was all designed to not necessarily make literal but cohesive colourful sense. It comes to together somehow. Artist’s plan? God’s plan?

Heart Station, one of my first coloured sketches when I started this small hobby two months ago.

And as you stand in the heart of this station where journeys happen, you begin to realise that no one is going to hold the train door for you, partly because it closes regardless of anyone’s care, if ever. The train leaves. You know another will arrive shortly, inducing train timetable logic during your anxiety. The mental gymnastics then just becomes a show for you to popcorn watch. If you were to ever commentate or review the highlights of an episode to an audience, you would need to add a just a little fuzziness so that you appear more desperate in this adulthood drown.

Sure, I’ve said before that empathy is the bridge for humanity, and it probably still is relevant. We all have strangerhood in common and we never truly know what’s happening with each other. I don’t think we ever will.

But not knowing is a damn good place to start. In fleeting moments we may feel light from the flow or heavy from the stillness. I know a bunch of people who are going through a bunch of things I went through a year ago. I can only vouch for how fleeting those experiences are to help brace them for the same, but it’s so very layered. I’ve lately been wondering how multidimensional our perceptions are. I might cry about leaving the current chapter because the next is not as good, or I am not sure what the next even is, or that it will be the first chapter to diverge from my friends’. And I simply project my internal feelings onto others because I believe we will feel the same things. We’re all in this together.

Maybe that’s the issue. To believe that we are all one and that when we diverge paths we breaks this oneness. We’ve been embarking on different paths from the get go since birth. The train might have the same destination but everyone is still going separately. That still shouldn’t invalidate the feeling that we’re indeed all in this mess together.

For those who already embrace this inevitable diverging aspect of people’s journeys, maybe not caring is a good cope. Why does this hurt the known person more than the stranger, though? Most people feel ignored because we mistake a glimpse of them as knowledge. A brush stroke suddenly equals the painting and the auction price is set rather high. So we just hope that it’s a master stroke that gives us just enough “data”, as one of my (boastful) university faculty opined, to form a social network of mutual benefit that we believe is rooted in respect.

No, respect is when we value the heroic mundane things that keep our lives propped up. I want to reclaim my awareness but it is so really tough. I want to observe not for the photograph but for the eye behind the lens. (Follow @flicksska on Instagram.) In About Time, the character time travels to repeat everyday twice so that the second could be spent on being attentive to notice the splendid mundanity of life’s seconds.

While we obviously cannot repeat, we can renew this art form by showing grace and kindness in all our social interactions. Life does not announce itself like the train, and we don’t have literal luminosity in terms of amber lights in the train and a route map to guide us. But we have been going through life pretty much like this, so we shall continue to do so. Me too, after publishing this post and checking for views and insights.

So what should we clutch on to when the time goes by? Should we clutch on to our youth? But they say that the youth is wasted on the young which feels condescending and slightly contradictory because there is no arbitrary young-old boundary and this is all just a social construct. Be young, be old, feel young, and/or feel old, doesn’t matter. Right now I am anxiously imagining that I am literally missing my train because I indulged in this slightly pretentious spiral. Good night.