Collision of the Worlds

I’m sitting outside underneath our gazebo. From here I can see the peek of our neighbor’s homes. We all have 6′ privacy fences around our yards, and screens and blinds on our windows.

In late spring and summer, I spend a lot of time outside at our little table, and even without an overly voyeuristic streak, it is inevitable that I get an insight into the world of our neighbors.

I might not see them, but I hear them.

There is the elderly lady with her little dachshund. In the mornings she steps outside in her floor-long robe and they both inspect the yard together. Later in the afternoon, they play together on the living room floor. She is a loner and doesn’t like other people too much. She often barbecues together with the even older lady who lives a few houses down -they enjoy each other’s company. Every Wednesday she dresses up and plays bingo, with a male friend, who picks her up in his old Cadilac. He rings the doorbell and waits outside, holds the passenger door open for her, and closes it when she is all buckled up. “He is not my boyfriend,” she says. Her first and only husband divorced her after forty-five years together. She doesn’t want another one of THOSE in her life. He hurt her when he left her, but now she seems happy. Next year she has to move away. “I signed up for the reversed mortgage a few years back, and now I have to leave my own home and move in with my daughter. We didn’t think I would get that old.” She is in her late 80s, still a proud woman, still wearing make-up, and still independent. Deep inside I hope she will love living with her daughter for the rest of her life. May it be a healthy one.

I can smell the grill from the other side. Our next-door neighbors will be cooking outside until late September. “We don’t want to heat up the house,” she told me once. They have an A/C but hate using it. Their house is identical to ours, just mirrored. We share a driveway and we talk when we meet, coming or going. From them, we have learned by watching HOW TO NOT RETIRE.

They stay at home. All she talked about are her grandchildren and her daughters, who are now in their late 50s already. If that’s all you talk about, does it mean your own life is already over? My neighbors are bored. She sits downstairs and calls her family every day, he is upstairs in his computer room, surrounded by small electronics -old relics from his job. “I wish I wouldn’t have retired,” he tells me. He has nothing to do. I call him when I need help moving or ‘flipping’ a piece of furniture. and he shows up in my workroom one minute later. He is glad to help, it gets him out of the house.

These are insights into other people’s worlds. Insights that they allow quite unconsciously. The insights into their everyday lives, into their habits, into their lives –to understand that all these people, whether in the house across the street from ours or anywhere else in the world, live in their own little bubbles on this planet. So many worlds!

We experience our life as a subject, self-centered. We only know our world, and all too often forget that other people live in a completely different world of their own. If we are standing at the checkout in the supermarket and in front of us there are six other people at the checkout –each of them has their own story, their experiences, their childhood, their family, their friends. In their hearts, they carry suffering, memories, love, hope, and dreams. And we? For these people, we are just some extra standing in line behind them at Aldi. Our world is just as unfamiliar to them as theirs is to us.

All day long we are busy with thoughts that revolve around our lives. Our lives, with the people in them, our possessions, our fears, and our plans. How many people do we meet in a single day on the street, at the subway station, or at work, who are nothing more than extras in our lives? We are never aware that these individuals see the world with their very own eyes and that they are just as active in their social network, of which they themselves are the center.

We think the world is the way we see it. But as so often, we are wrong. Of course, our world may be so but there is no such thing as a state of the world that objectively applies to all people. Life has so many facets, variations, and scope –there are probably endless combinations of how a life can be lived and no two are alike. Even the world of the people who are close to us, whom we think we know better than ourselves, we can never see the world through their eyes. Because even those who have an excess of empathy can only use the things that their own lives have given them as tools when putting themselves in other people’s shoes.

A collision of worlds, every day, tens of thousands. So many extras, so many faces, so many people in our lives who courageously carry their own world around them day after day. Who ask themselves what their meaning is in this life, what dreams they are fighting for, and where their happiness lies –unconsciously about the fact that the person next to them in a traffic jam may be asking the same questions. Worlds collide every day and we hardly notice it because our own world surrounds us like a thick layer of cotton wool.

If we all would be aware of it, and if we would dedicate more than just a short glance to other people’s worlds with curious eyes, wondering who they were having dinner with and when was the last time they had to laugh from the bottom of their hearts. Because, even if we are all at home in our own little world, we can build small bridges between the worlds and courageously enter them from time to time. I think it would help not to take yourself so seriously. Not to regard one’s own life, one’s own views, one’s own judgments as the absolute non-plus-ultra.

Maybe that’s what would unite all our worlds in the end.