Waxing Philosophical

Originally posted Feb. 1, 2006

As I walked to work this morning and passed someone who didn't seem to want to exchange pleasantries, I wondered to myself how many people the average person walks by in his or her lifetime.

Now, I'm not talking about film/music/etc. celebrities, or even local celebrities, because their fame obviously exposes them to people on a regular basis. I'm talking about the average Joe. Just a normal person. How many people will that person walk by? Thousands? A million? Isn't it weird to think that maybe we can pass the same people three, four, maybe 10 times throughout our lives but never recognize them, and therefore never realize we've seen them before? Creepy! It makes me think of "The Truman Show," where Truman's world was full of scripted, casted people...they were there by design, but Truman didn't know it. Until one day...one day, he watched his rearview mirror and finally saw a pattern. A lady on a bike. Flowers. A Volkswagen Beetle.

What if we all have ladies on bikes, flowers and Volkswagen Beetles rotating through our existence, but we just don't pick up on it? Think about it...if you pass someone on the street and get maybe a three-second look at their face, are you really going to recognize them again if you pass them three months later?

OK, so I'm getting philosophical, but it's a mind trip to me. When I lived in Alamo and Danville, where the populations aren't as big as some of the other places I've lived, I'd see people all the time -- at the store, at the post office, around town -- who I didn't recognize...and it always struck me as kind of funny that I didn't know who they were, because I don't consider Alamo and Danville to be all that big. So...maybe I really was seeing those people all the time, and just not registering it.

Maybe we all live in a "Truman Show" world....maybe we're all part of some autistic kid's dream, like at the end of the TV show "Dallas"! Or maybe...maybe the world isn't as big as we think it is...maybe we just don't pay close enough attention to the people who ebb and flow in and out of our paths every day, month, year. They all have stories. They're all people, just like us.

And all I said was "good morning."