Complex Commonality

"...it's better than doing it in Vegas..." "...then he handed me the banana, and I threw it at him..." "...literally, everybody was puking at the same time. Literally..." "...it's just hard now because my home doesn't feel like home anymore. My parents split up and now strangers live in the house I grew up in..." "...oh, man, seriously? You need to call her and apologize. Right now..." "...yeah, they met at a logging competition. What is a logging competition anyway?" "...I went skydiving yesterday!"

This succession of statements is an example of snippets of conversations I hear every day - riding the bus, walking across campus, at work, studying downtown... It is interesting to me how many lives converge under the umbrella of necessity, but how separate everyone's life really is. People are funny. Hearing passing comments like this makes me wonder from what context those statements stemmed.

How can people's lives be so intricate, so complicated, so interweaving and yet so separate? This is not the first time I have experienced this sentiment, and I know I am not the only one who has. Maybe this is idea of being alone together is why humans desire so bad to connect - to something, to someone.

Everyone's world is so real to them, so important - but somehow things seem to lose significance if they do not directly affect me in some way. Sometimes (I probably should venture to say most times) it's even hard to connect emotionally to things that do directly affect me. It's easier to look at them from a self-proclaimed distance, to push them away so I don't have to deal with them - to avoid getting hurt or facing that looming inevitable situation I don't want to face.

In the meantime, since I first heard the fragments of those conversations, people's lives have been moving on, their issues, big or small, significant or insignificant, have been resolved, or made worse, maybe they have completely new issues now, or perhaps they haven't dealt with them at all...maybe they have detached themselves from the situation, or maybe they have come to see the crushing reality of facing the inevitable. I wonder... did the guy call and apologize? Did the girl realize there is more to life than throwing bananas at people? Or did she come to the conclusion that the banana needed to be thrown? I will never know, and I will stop wondering about it soon, because the things in my life will soon regain my full attention.