I don’t know if its my general mood lately (which, if you read yesterday’s post, you know is still Super Depressed), but I’ve been thinking about my place in the world and my perceptions of the world around me as I move through it. Not as deeply as that sentence probably implies, though. More of the “what does it mean to be here and myself in this moment, as I move through the world, go about my daily life, and occasionally enter into the worlds of other people?” than the “what is the purpose of my existence.” Both are a lot to think about, but the first one really only ever matters in context while the other only really matters in the abstract. Plus, I spent most of the first thirty years of my life thinking about the latter and spent most of that same period of time avoiding the former. Now, I don’t have any major conclusions to share or even any deep questions that occurred to me since that’s kind of not the point of what I’m thinking about and why I’m thinking about it. These sort of things are the result of constant moment-to-moment choices and the instant I settle on one answer or solution or whatever you want to call it, it’ll no longer be true unless I force myself to stay the same somehow. What I do have, instead, is two chance encounters that kind of exemplify this type of thought that play off each other better than anything else I could describe as part of a mundane moment in my life.

First, when I went on my walk today, I threw aside the hours of silences and quiet isolation I’d been cultivating without a second thought when a small child of perhaps two or three years of age said hello to me and asked me what I was doing. This child was walking with their mother, saw me approach going the opposite direction, shattered the careful peace I’d embraced today after a stomach bug kept me home from work, and I replied without a second thought. As it turns out, from the brief exchange this child and I had as their caretaker looked on, smiling, I was going for a walk and they were “going to school” at three in the afternoon. They talked about school a bit and then wandered away, moving the focus of their monologue from me to their caretaker without missing a beat. I smiled warmly at them the whole time, gave a warm, reassuring smile to their caretaker, and then carried on my way when they seemed to forget I was there. Only as I walked away, though, did I remember that I’d cultivated that silence and peace because I was exhausted of being around people and sick of having to put on a warm, cheerful face when that expression was so at-odds with my mood. That was part of what made me not mind the stomach bug as much as I might have, after all. It meant that I didn’t need to go be personable at work, something that I sorely needed after a week of being incredibly frustrated and upset with people that I had to stay, at a minimum, cordial with.

As I pondered this automatic decision, I realized that it was important to me that this child not be ignored by a random stranger they met. I couldn’t guarantee that any stranger this child spoke to would react with the same warmth and friendliness that I did, but I could guarantee that I was not the person who would introduce the idea of being ignored or unimportant or unworthy of attention to this child. I was going to do my best to help this child maintain the idea that the world could be a friendly place, that other people could be kind and would return the energy that they put out. Just like I wouldn’t tell a child what to believe about Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny or any other figure of wonder and imagination, I wasn’t going to be the person who contributed to a child’s view of the world dimming. Not because of any particular moral stance, but because I want the world to be a place where people can still believe that people are good and strangers can be friendly. Sure, there’s a lot of consideration for my own childhood mixed up in there, but a lot of processing and dealing with my trauma from my childhood is making sure I’m the kind of person I wish had been around when I was a kid. I’m not be perfect–far from it, really–but my place in this world is as someone who will always return that warmth and friendliness even if they don’t feel it themselves.

What made this worthy of writing about, ultimately, is that I spent the first half of my walk thinking about this, considering my place in the universe and the place I occupied as a figure in other people’s lives and then I ran into the child and their guardian at the corner store. I was stopping in for a bit of candy to fulfill a small craving and I ran into them as they picked up a few things (I didn’t really look that closely since that feels a bit creepy to me). The child didn’t recognize me at all. Their eyes passed over me and kept moving, not stopping even a little bit, as their guardian and I shared a look, hers sympathetic and mine wry. It was a funny moment to have, to be completely and utterly reminded that I was only a tangent in this child’s life, despite the brief but intense attention they gave me, as I stood next to a heart-shaped tin of Valentine’s Day chocolates featuring notorious partner killer, Darth Vader, of all people. Just an utterly mundane and ordinary day with absolutely nothing special going on as I considered my place in other people’s lives. It was truly remarkable in its mundanity.

As I’ve already said, I have no profound thoughts to share, not even a realization. I just spent some time thinking during a walk, about a topic that suddenly felt very important to me as a result of a moment that probably wasn’t very important to anyone, myself included. It lasted three minutes total, between these two interactions, and I’m still thinking about it three hours later. It just so perfectly encapsulates our self-centered view of the world because, even if we don’t think of ourselves as the most important part of the world, we can only rarely see the world from any other perspective than our own. Today, I got to see myself through this child’s eyes and while it was nice to be reminded that I can seem cool and interesting to someone who doesn’t know me, it was also kind of nice to be reminded that, most of the time, people don’t think about me. I’m sure I can make a strong impression when the time is right, but most of the time I’m just another person passing briefly through someone else’s life. No more and no less important than any other.