People Watching

Having kicked off my exam week to a good start this morning, I decided to forgo study for a bit and run a few errands at the local shopping centre. Two hours later, errands run and brand new shoes tucked under arm (it was inevitable), I sank into a big blue leather couch to eat my lunch. With a side order of people watching, of course. Don’t get me wrong, my salmon salad sandwich was delicious, but my mind has a nasty habit of straying at the best (or worst) of times. So, devoid of company and literary entertainment, my eyes quickly came to rest on the busy escalator before me.

When I am people watching, I like to think of myself as a sort of passive script writer for an infinitesimal fragment of an endless film. I simultaneously narrate the film and create internal monologues and unheard dialogues for the actors passing through. There is even character development. At first, all the characters seem unique, bearing no resemblance or relation to one another. Later, patterns emerge and they become easier to label – the business man, the retired couple, the new mum. Then eventually, the nuances are picked up and individuality overrides stereotype once more. 

I always make some new observation about the characters in these brief episodes. And with each sequel, they are adjusted and re-established, their exceptions noted. Here are a few off the top of my head:

1) Most people don’t acknowledge Strangers.

The few who do (with nod, a faint smile, or just eye contact) almost always receive a surprised smile in return.

2) People very rarely look above their eye level.

3) Parents with Small Children are almost always crabby and anxious. They treat curiosity like a disease and have a vocabulary limited to “no” and “don’t”. This is expressed in a pleasant tonal range of Grumpy to Cranky. They frown at everything, especially that blessed minority – Parents with Well-Behaved Children.

This minority treat their kids with respect and use gentle-but-firm explanations.

There couldn’t possibly be a connection here, could there?

4) People never seem to notice the Watchers.

5) There are always other Watchers. The Watcher usually seems oblivious to this fact.

There is a song by Jack Johnson – called “People Watching”, funnily enough:

“I'm just people watching,
The other people watching me...

I see so many feet going so many ways,
People passing by, they got nothing to say,
All on our own, just watching and confused...

We're as lonely as we wanted to be
We're not so lonely as we wanted to be”

The last two lines have always puzzled me. I’m still not sure what Jack Johnson means by them, but they do remind me of another observation I’ve made:

Although we all appear lonely to passersby, behind the scenes, everyone has a whole network of family and friends – an unseen web, the hidden body of the iceberg, a private universe. And then I think, each individual in this network has their own world, and each in that world links to hundreds more...and so on and so forth until everyone on Earth is connected in some way. It really does make my head spin.

Or perhaps, the lyrics refer to the fact that we think we are alone in our people watching, that we can be “as lonely as we [want] to be”, but in actual fact, we are not because there are always other people watching us back. 

What do you make of it, dear reader? Are you a Watcher too? If not, next time you go out, stop and observe for a while. You never know what interesting things you might see. 

Just remember, there are always others watching you too...