We Are All the Same

While on a day off, I didn’t know what to do with myself. The house didn’t need cleaning, the dog didn’t need washing, and I didn’t have blog yet at that time thus no blog needed updating.

In utter boredom, I decided to go out of my comfort zone called home and stop by a coffee shop to try their famous frapuccino. (This happened before I quit my addiction to coffee.) I chose to stay in a cozy corner by the glass wall. A few sips later I found myself carefully observing everyone who was in the coffee shop and everyone who walked by. I became an amateur social scientist for an hour or two or three. I can’t remember exactly how long, but I can remember that I tried to study my subjects well: I guessed who they were, why they were there at that moment, what they do, what they were thinking, where they came from and where they were going.

From my nook, I have observed that my subjects exhibited varieties. They looked different from each other, they didn’t have the same taste in fashion , they walked in different manner and pace, they had different mannerisms, they had different facial expressions, they had their own ways of greeting each other, they belonged to different groups, and so on and so forth.

Some of the people I saw were couples with their hands joined. A mother holding her baby dearly. A couple kissing. Children happily clinging to their dad’s hands. A group of teenagers laughing and poking at each other. An old man and an old woman walking hand-in-hand. A dad buying cotton candy for her daughter. A little girl having a birthday party in a fast food joint just across the street. And a happy teenage girl and her mom who looked fresh from a shopping spree.

I must say that my short stint as an amateur social scientist was fun. I realized that watching people from a distant is fascinating. Far away, people tell stories with their unguarded actions. And from where I was, I saw an intimate view of a universal truth: that even though we act and look different from each other on the outside, we are all the same on the inside. We all have the same desire to love, be loved, be happy, and make our loved ones happy.

Wordless Wednesday #2: Lonely River Flows to the Sea