The millions of lives I cross every day
It’s a rainy Wednesday.
I’m on the subway, on my way home.
A girl standing in front of me has her yellow umbrella hooked on her backpack.
It’s unintentionally pointed at the middle aged man sitting next to me.
The train sways.
The tip of the umbrella lightly stabs the knee of the man.
The train sways again.
Stabs again.
The man next to me lets out a passive aggressive exhale.
Sways again.
Stabs.
The man, with the phone in his hand, whacks the umbrella like angrily swatting a fly.
The girl quickly lowers her head, bows, and unhooks her umbrella from her backpack.
The train arrives at the final stop.
Everyone flows out the train like a burst water pipe.
I see a woman keep looking back over her shoulder - a man’s office bag is stuck in the opposite closed train door.
They’re clearly strangers, but the woman quickly tells a train conductor passing by that the man is stuck.
The conductor rushes over.
The woman walks on to the exit, on with her commute.
These two interactions between two complete strangers happened within 5 minutes of each other.
The first is a case where the man will go on his day, perhaps telling his family about a stupid girl who stabbed him on the train today. Or the girl will go on to tell her friends about the grumpy man who assaulted her umbrella.
The second is a case where the man might have not even known that a woman had sent a conductor to go help him. And the woman might just go on with her day without even thinking about the man ever again.
Both are tales of two strangers who unknowingly played a role in each other's lives. Both are minuscule and one-time decisions made by completely independent variables. A spontaneous or impulsive decision that one person made influenced another person’s fate.
It’s so easy to forget how we all have the capacity to completely alter someone else’s life. Most of the time it’s nothing life-changing; just a slight feeling, a thought, or a sensation. But still, it’s all somehow threaded together.
I’d like to think that this is a beautiful thing, that everything we go through each day, what we see, hear, eat, feel, are products of an infinite series of minuscule and one-time decisions by individuals that I’ll never meet in my lifetime.
Or maybe I’m just trying to make sense of this chaotic world.