Good morning. Sometimes we assume the people and things around us are neutral or hostile to our existence. What if the opposite could be true?
Tuning inNormally I pass my morning commute absorbed in a book, headphones on, trying to create a cocoon in public. I miss a lot of what’s going on around me, but my reading hours are so limited and my “Books Read in 2025” list is so embarrassingly short that I give up presence to get a couple of chapters in. One day this week, however, I kept my book in my bag and made a game of looking at the people around me and imagining what their voices sound like. The woman in the trench coat and boots has a sultry baritone; the child, a lisp. The tall guy in the plaid flannel shirt has a surprisingly high and squeaky voice — he used to be self-conscious about it but now it’s just him. What kind of accents does everyone have, who smiles when they talk, who has a cold coming on that you can hear in their throat? This game is a variation on my usual one: “Where Is That Person Going?” It’s not really fun, as games go, but it keeps me occupied, noticing, engaged with the world rather than ignoring it. There are many variations on this activity: If I were friends with that person, what would our relationship be like? Or, what’s that person worried about? A good one for when you’re feeling sorry for yourself — everyone’s got their own private disquiet, you’re not alone. In his poem “Everything Is Waiting for You,” David Whyte addresses the fundamental error of assuming separateness from everything and everyone else. “As if life / were a progressive and cunning crime / with no witness to the tiny hidden transgressions.” He advises the reader to become alert. “You must note / the way the soap dish enables you, or the window latch grants you freedom.” What a way of engaging with the mundane! The ordinary items around us are animate in his reading of the world. And not only that — they’re predisposed to look on us favorably, to enable us, free us. My retreat into books while on the train is only partly about getting reading done. It’s also about shutting out distraction, on the premise that whatever is happening around me is intrusive, possibly unpleasant, at the very least extraneous to my central purpose, which is getting from A to B. Sitting and just being in space with strangers — whether on public transportation, or in a doctor’s waiting room, or in the audience before the movie starts — instead of retreating into a book or a phone sometimes requires reorientation. Who and what else is here? What if these noise-canceling headphones are keeping me from hearing the actually quite charming voices of the people beside me? If I want to feel more connected to other people, then what’s protective isn’t always productive. Or, as Whyte instructs, “Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the / conversation.”
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