People Watching
#31: It is an art.
On a bright Saturday morning, I walked into the waiting room of the local Honda car service center. My car was due for an oil change and I had finally managed to book an appointment after procrastinating on it for a few weeks. I sat down on the sofa and plopped open my iPad to write this edition. I had something else planned for this week’s newsletter. But as I glanced around the room, there were 15 odd souls waiting patiently while their car was being worked on. I got curious.
The room was large and no one was sitting next to each other. Almost everyone was on their phones, as if with the tap a button they created a bubble of an invisible force field that no one dared to breach. It felt like everyone had done mental math to find the most optimal distance to create their own bubble. There was an even spread of people throughout the room, like pepperoni on a pizza.
Some had headphones on and were engrossed watching video content. Some were exercising their thumbs scrolling on the screen, their eyes moving in straight lines as they scanned their phones from top to the bottom. One of them was typing and it was interesting to see the facial expressions change with every text. I’m sure 99% of the waiting rooms of the world would probably be a version of this room. But this was the first time in a very long time that I had bothered to look up from my phone and look around.
There was one person in the crowd who really caught my attention.
Sitting calmly on his chair was a man, white hair and wrinkled skin to show for his old age. He did not have phone in his hands. It did not look like he would be bothered if he missed the next viral trend on the internet. He was more interested in looking through the glass wall right in front of him. All his attention was absorbed by the cars rolling across from left to the right, as if it was his version of doom scrolling. Once in a while, his eyes would follow a person who crossed his field of vision. But then he would look out again, back to car scrolling. He seemed to be at peace with the world around him, present in the moment, in some sort of a meditative state.
All these people in the room were living a unique life and yet happened to be at a car service center on a Saturday morning. I was trying to play a game of guessing, trying to figure out their age, the story under the smile, the kind of work they did. I know, it was silly. Even with my Sherlock level observational skills I had a zero percent chance of getting anything correct.
Among all this people watching, there were a few moments when I felt like I was staring at a someone longer than necessary. So I would bury myself in my iPad and then steal a glance as if thinking about something. But I also wanted to decipher their lives. People watching reveals more about us than about the people we watch. You try to relate to the traits that you lack and project onto them your insecure judgements. It make us look inward and the reflect on how we want to something the other person is doing or not doing.
People watching is a fine balance between being a stalker and being curios. It is like an art. All my curiosity could have been solved, if instead of watching, I could have said hi to the strangers in the waiting room.