Pondering People and Places

Living at the end of a cul-de-sac in a mixed hardwood and pine forest satisfies my craving for solitude. But when that craving has been fully met for an extended period, I sometimes long for human interaction. That yearning for engagement takes two distinct forms: 1) a desire to anonymously and casually observe strangers go about their lives; and 2) an eagerness to experience the luxury of being in the company of friends or family or acquaintances whose presence can help block the discomfort that comes with exposure to the collective flaws of humanity.

What I’ll call observational experience can take place almost anywhere; a place in the presence of strangers where I can watch people. I remember standing in the middle of various bridges over the Chicago River, watching people scurry about. While I watched, I concocted stories about many of those anonymous strangers. I knew where they lived, their housekeeping habits, the kinds of people in their social networks, and the extent to which living or working in the city either satisfied their dreams or stood as an obstacle to achieving them. Their lives, although completely different from mine, were absolutely familiar to me. Knowing them, the way I did, I was safe with them and from them.

Engaged experience is my term for the kind of intimacy among people who are close; a completely anonymous stranger would not fit in that group of people. That level of closeness almost always involves emotional connections, perhaps tempered with something like intellectual parity. Intellectual parity, alone, cannot create the kind of bond to which I refer. Engaged experiences tend to be the most fulfilling (though both are appealing and satisfying), but they can change from comfortable relationships to difficult and unpleasant relationships in the blink of an eye. That potential for change (and the fact that dissolving connections gone awry with people in that sphere can be so difficult) tends to cause people, especially introverts, to slow the development of such relationships.

But, back to living in the woods. I am used to the privacy and the quiet. I like the aloneness living here provides. Yet it is the periodic visit by forest inhabitants that unexpectedly thrill me. Yesterday afternoon, I glanced out a front window to see a large deer saunter down the street directly in front of my house. It is not at all uncommon to see such sights; nonetheless, I am almost giddy with excitement when they occur. If what I saw, instead, was a human figure walking by, I would be at once curious and a little alarmed. The deer’s motives, from my perspective, are pure and unthreatening. Even though I know about as much about the man as I do about the deer, I distrust him. Whereas the deer has ample innocent reason to stroll by my house, I assume the man’s motives are not in my best interests. Fortunately, it is much more likely for me to see a deer walk by than for me to see a man pass by my house. Which is largely responsible for my happiness with my home’s location. If I had 2000 acres of land, surrounded by an impenetrable electrical fence, I might feel even more secure and comfortable in my solitude.

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I wrote a lengthy paragraph about my longing to create a third place. My connection was lost, though, and there is no record of what I wrote except in my mind. I am too tired/lazy to try to reconstruct it.  That’s upsetting; I was getting all excited about my ideas for a third place.