Sometime I stare at people and really think about them. Not really as individual people and their lives they may lead or the thoughts they might have, but just as people. How bizarre the human race is, when I think of us purely as animals I wonder “How come we are so different?” sure we do have those apparent animal traits apparent sometime, like the natural instinct of a mother caring for her young or even just the instinct to survive. Just thinking of the huge leap the mankind has taken from the stone ages is incredible.
I was on a train home the other day when I was looking at a couple. Not in a creepy gawky way but just in a looking and thinking type way, when I started to think. This couple had those signs of nature, pairing up, but they were also on this train. A train that no one stops and thinks about they just see it as “well I need to be on this train so I can get home.” When they should really be thinking “I’m going to get inside this giant invention that someone thought of and then somehow worked out a way in which their idea would work is going to transport me from this location to another faster than anyone hundreds of years ago would even think we could travel. Then once I reach my destination I am going to go into my home which protects me from all types of weather and has endless amounts of tool and inventions that while we could not even consider a world without didn’t exist 100 years ago. But clearly we wouldn’t think that because all of that is a little frightening to think about.
Despite going through all this thought process about how incredible the progression of the human race is while staring at these two people, I still never looked at them as being just like me. I still can’t. I can never comprehend that these people have these interior thoughts and ideas. I know that they do have them, I’m not that naïve. I just struggle to picture of think of what they would be thinking. And would they be thinking the same or similar to me? I could say “of course they are, my thoughts aren’t unique enough for me to be the only person on this 7 point something billion people filled earth. But then again how am I to know. There is no way for me to know that a person is thinking the exact same thing as me. Even if they told me or wrote it down, that is still not a sure way. They could mean those same words to mean something completely different. In fact I am almost certain that you are reading this in a different way than any other person that is to read it. Why? Because you have a different past, different experiences that influence how you understand texts an events. You are in a different state of mind then the next person. You could also be thinking this is all a load of crap, which would be a different view then someone that thinks this is all profound (pretty sure no one thinks this is profound.)
Even me writing this. I understand what I am saying now very differently than if I were to write it this morning when I woke up. In fact I can tell you for certain that I wouldn’t write this in the morning when I wake up because I am never in that mind set of “but why?” when I first wake up, it’s always a state I come to some time after 1am when I have tried to get to sleep but have just been too awake and decide I just want to write. When I started this I didn’t have a single thought about leading to how people understand things differently, this just happened to be a digression of an observational piece.
I have got to the point of the blog where I have finally become too tired to stay awake, which means this worked. Good night internet hope you too get some sleep soon.
Stevie.
