Sunday, September 07, 2008

On contact..

In order to move forward in life, to progress, to evolve.. something must change, must it not? It is so easy to hope that meeting someone new can spiral off a chain of events similar to that which you hope for: in my case not so silently and secretly sometimes.

However, there are god knows how many people in this vast world, and reflecting on this fact, it upsets me to realise how few we will make contact with. And contact, what do we classify as contact?

A smile: You walked past and caught my eye, my lips betrayed a hesitance to smile, which you caught and threw back at me in full-toothed glory. You went, you came back, you went again, mouthing "goodbye", topped with another. Will I ever see you again?

A hello, a short conversation: Common needs brought us together for a few moments and we ended up talking. I don't think either of us remember what about, but it did not matter, we were lost within each others projections. You reminded me of someone I would like to know, to keep around, but I knew that saying goodbye meant I would possibly not see you again. But I could not keep you for too long, and whether or not the same realisation was encapsulated within you, it did not matter. Because it ended with goodbye.

Contact can't only be either of these, or similar interactions - for we do not live in the village communities of old, where habit brings us to the same places, the same people, day after day. So such contact can and will probably be once-off - then what can we do to change it, to make it twice-off? Social akwardness born of social expectations govern us. And we know not who dares to break the mould, so we do not break it ourselves.
Questions, I can give you questions. But answers I struggle for.

9 comments:

Gordie said...

The best reason to meet someone for the first time is so you can meet them for the second time.

Romeo Morningwood said...

According to several Paleo-Psychologists Humans have evolved to comfortably manage about 150 relationships...
and this makes sense since most of our history was spent in small clannish villages.

Our brains still haven't caught up to our new circumstances since we moved into cities...we have however adapted by generalizing ethnic groups and social signals so that we can estimate a person's character by their appearance..and we dress accordingly to send out our advertisements.

This is why we Cities don't really work and we still live in our little microcosms...meeting strangers is exciting..especially when we are searching for that special someone outside of our gene pool. Unfortunately we are saddled with Millenia of defensive adaptations that kept us from being killed by our rivals from the next village.

Romeo Morningwood said...

btw
I added the 'Stand By Your Man' from Youtube..I somehow thought that this twangy hit was ubiquitous.. on a global scale..
mercifully, it was not.

Leila said...

The thing is, meeting strangers is awesome.. but making that stranger into a friend/more just seems tough, living as we do in these cities.

The thing is it's easy to make contact, but it's not easy to render a chance of it being repeated, without feeling like a 'stalker' or 'over-eager'..

Leila said...

and i realise i said "the thing is" twice...
uhhh must stop saying that. *cringe*

Leila said...

Hahaha, Don, Ill go check it out just now!

Walker said...

There are six oceans in the world.
Five are labeled clearly on the globe, Artic, Antarctic or Southern, Indian, Atlantic and Pacific.
The sixth one and the one most people drown in isn’t, it’s humanity.
In today’s world people are more cautious and less inclined to take risks because they’ve almost drowned in the past or have heard the stories from others but you can’t learn to swim unless you jump in and ride the waves of emotion.
Some people aren’t willing or are scared to get wet so they just put their toes in to get wet but refuse to leap in.

Thank you for stopping by and stop by any time.

sage said...

the ships meeting in a night syndrome... don't know how many people I've meet like this and years later wonder what happened.

Clockworkchris said...

Leila,
I have much more trouble with the first eye contact so maybe I haven't evolved to the tribe mentality yet. Being 29 now, once in the history of my life have I walked up to a stranger and just said hello and started talking. That worked wonderfully and beacme the first real relationship of my life at age 17-19. However I have not done it again. I will wink, smile, act crazy, try to get some attention, but never be the first the speak.
For me the internet and this blogging experience is my safe-haven of people that I may never know in the flesh, but I share my laughter, love, empathy, anger, and hatred with the world openly. The world seems to enjoy it.
I think I will skip the city step and make an assumption that this is the next one.