For as big as the world and as many people there are wandering it, it can sometimes feel like we're drifting by people without ever knowing they're near us. Think about all the people that surround you every day. Most of them you won't ever know. Or you only catch glimpses of who they are because more often than not, we only see what people want us to see. In some ways I think we put on a different mask for different situations. These masks are designed to only show certain things to people and hide the rest. With that happening then it's entirely possible that we're missing out on the vast majority of who people really are.
Sitting in a crowded room full of strangers it's easy to forget that every one of them has a whole lifetime of experiences they carry around. It shapes who they are and the culmination of their life choices brought them to the same location as you at the same exact moment. You may never realize all the nuances that makes up them, but somehow their completely different path in life intersected with yours, even if it's only for a little while. In that moment there is a possibility for your lives to merge or separate. For most of us a stranger stays a stranger. We are all already established with other relationships so there may not be any desire or need for a new connection. Strangers may become almost faceless to us and I wonder if part of that is a defense mechanism. We can't allow everyone in because that would be overwhelming.
It's really up to us to decide how much we show to the world. It's also up to us how much we want to take in from the world and the people in it. I'm not saying you go out into the world and make friends with everyone who passes in your general direction. I think it would help us as a society if we made an effort to remember that the stranger who does passes near you has had an entire life before you crossed paths. We can't possibly know their story, but we may not realize that their story colors how they move through the world, just as our own life stories shape how we interact with the world around us. Up until that point you may have never known about each other and afterward you may not even remember the encounter, but at that moment you share the same story, just different aspects of it.
Most people have at least one significant person in their life that they haven't always known, but you can't remember life before you met them. This may be a spouse or friend or whatever. They have become so important to your own life that not having them around would be like losing a limb. Now try to imagine what it would be like if you had never made a connection with them. That could have come from never meeting them or simply meeting them at the wrong time in your life so that there was nothing special about it. We think about how our lives are more fulfilled because of these people and maybe part of that is because we don't know any better. What's to say that the road not taken would be filled with regret or emptiness because that person isn't there? By not having met that one person we could have opened up the possibility to meet several others. Or our lives could have shifted in such a way that we didn't need that person in our life at all.
The thing is that this happens to us every day and we don't even know it. That person in the lane next to you on the drive in today, they may have been a lifelong friend had you had a chance to talk to them. Instead you continued on your way and so did they. There's nothing wrong with that and I suppose you can't spend too much time worrying about all the missed opportunities. Still it can be interesting to think about how things may have changed if circumstances were even slightly different. So as you're moving through your day, living your life, know that you're surrounded by people doing the same thing. There are so many people living parallel lives that are just outside our field of view. Every once and awhile those parallels cross over each other. It's in those precise moments that we could make a difference in how things will continue on from there. Most of the time we just keep on our own path without realizing what could have been.
