There was a coffee shop in a city I usta live in that had big plate glass storefront windows. Now I know this doesn't sound like anything out of the ordinary because there are very few coffee shops that don’t offer views of passerby, but with this this particular coffee shop, it was different.
Maybe it was the light. Maybe it was the location. Maybe it was because it was close to the river. Maybe it had to do with the diversity of the populace in that part of town. Maybe all of the above. And maybe there was something more, undefined, that made the view from those windows so compelling for the view out of this coffee shop's windows approached art.
People of all races and ages walked by. Shuffled by. Staggered by. Limped by. Ran by. You name it.
Some days it was incredibly hot, some days it was bone chillin' cold. Every person walking by was as unique as a snowflake. To some degree different. Most were ordinary, not so noteworthy, the difference between them and the person I saw ten minutes ago that looked kinda like them wasn't much. Life was, however, indelibly etched upon passerby faces and some particular faces I wanted to draw in black and white. I wanted to capture whatever was in those faces because they modeled universal human traits. They were striking in their features, in their expression. This was a persistent idea I had but never actually followed up on, probably due to my wanting to look at the next passing person's face!
Lots of data being taken in.
Antonio Dicaterina- Unsplash.com
It was mesmerizing to watch this parade of humanity pass by. Of course, after you spend time anywhere you start noticing local characters, but of those there were relatively few. The sheer number of different people that this tourist town constantly brought in from everywhere got me wondering over time if God was keeping track of all these people- and why?
Surely there was a lot of life experience there, for good and bad, but what did all that experiencing amount to? Anything? Were people born to simply experience being human- breathing, eating, excreting, procreating? To experience being a child, then a teen, then an adult? To experience the wearing of clothing, courting of one's mate, holding job(s), wending their way through school, getting on the wrong side of the law? Some looked to have been been lucky in their experiencing, while others looked beaten down. Some were missing limbs, or they were walking in what looked to be painful ways. Some were exuberant, some sullen. Jesus it was better than any reality show on TV because here it wasn't just pretty faces, voluptuous bodies, and workout builds. Not at all. Here it was all the people that you don’t see on TV, which is most of humanity. I wanted to know their stories. "What (the hell) happened?!”.
But finding that out was an impossibility. I had to turn away. It was too much. There were too many of them- and they kept coming. Numbers! What does a hundred mean to you, a thousand? A hundred thousand, a million? Those are the numbers demographers throw out when they reference people. Describing people in this manner is necessary but it turns people into abstract entities, almost unreal.
Mind-boggling, this is. There are over three hundred million people in the United States. China and India each contain over a billion people. That's a lot of faces!
So what does it all mean? Why did all these souls volunteer to be here? From what I have seen, the vast majority of them didn't come here to party. Why did they volunteer for endless suffering, boredom, and lackluster daily experiencing, which could be succinctly said to be 'just existing'? Is human life so precious that each and every one of them would pit themselves against a mass of other people in an arena, an arena from which very few rise to positions of wealth or prominence, in order to 'give it a go and see what happens', knowing full well that the odds were against them; that there might be one or many who would subdue them, cheat at the game, shatter their dreams, place them in cages political or financial; this along with the possibility that they themselves might fall ill or suffer accident, sidelining them temporarily or permanently, and so many, many other things?
Really, why bother? What's the point? Were we born to watch Netflix and SportsCenter (hey- gettin' personal here!), watch other people on TV, read about them in the papers, or online, watch them on the silver screen again and again as they play out their careers while we read the Good Book and wait politely our arrival to The Promised Land (via Rapture, preferrably), while others await the arrival of benevolent aliens and still others enlightenment- or oblivion?
Are not all of us dreamers? Wishful thinkers? Each one of us on a personal quest, each one of us on the Hero's Journey of the ego trying to make who we are and what we do matter? We must be! There is no other sane answer. We're all givin' life a go and buckin' serious odds but you know, while winnin' at the game is great, losin' at it ain't so bad.
Just take a look through any coffee shop window. You'll see you got plenty of company.