Connected

I live in a big city.  I live in a big, crowded, polluted city, overflowing with frustrated strangers who don't want to be here.  Each day, loud, hot-blooded, Mediterranean-pitched arguments break out on the street, three stories below my window.  The shouts echo, bouncing back and forth between all of the concrete walls that surround the pavement.


"Ade re malaka!" (Come on, you wanker!), followed promptly by the shrill honking of horns and some more swearing that I don't yet understand.  This is a common, everyday scene amidst the chaos that is Athens.

It's easy for me to laugh it off from my perch up here, tucked safely away behind my desk and computer screen.  Sometimes I even practice my own singing pitch by trying to match a nice "Laaaa" to the notes of the car horns. 

However, when I leave the building, I suddenly find myself in the ranks of the angry.  It is hectic, it is rushed, it is distrust and suspicion, it is frustration, it is judgement, it is greed, it is a complete lack of respect... it is all of the worst parts of human nature all crammed into the few blocks that separate my apartment building from the place where I go to buy my food.  I can't help but notice this eery feeling of isolation in a crowd.  It feels like we're all enemies, yet we're in the same army.  We're all strangers, but somehow we've ended up together.  We're all separate, we all have to compete to survive, and nobody likes it.  This feeling does not sit well with me.  It feels somehow unnatural.

One of the reasons this feels so negative to me is that it goes against my intuition.  No matter how separate we feel from each other.  No matter how much spatial distance there might be between our bodies or how different they might look from one another, the fact is that we are all so thoroughly connected.  It's a connection that I can feel as well as see.  It's intuitional and logical.  I mean, we breathe the same air, drink the same water, share the same world... how could we not be completely connected?

So, when I see people looking at each other with distrust, suspicion or even the intention to take advantage of someone else, it just feels wrong.  It's self-destructive.  It makes no sense.  Yet it exists... everywhere.  And Athens is giving me the heaviest dose of this oxymoron that I've ever had.  Thus begins our place of departure.  What a fascinating place...