The Subway

Thoughts about riding the Subway to work:

Twice a day I spend roughly 45 minutes commuting on the subway and I find the way that people behave all together is really strange.

No one touches each other at all. No matter how crowded it gets, people go out of their way not to make any physical contact at all. The slightest brush of an elbow will usually cite an “I’m sorry”, or “excuse me”. One day I decided to try walking through the thickest part of the crowd that was waiting for a train that had yet to arrive. It was amazing - the people just parted out of the way. Not a single person made any contact.

[There are exceptions, of course. One time I was waiting at the entrance of a full train for the doors to close. The train was already packed and I was not going to be able to get on. But then a woman behind me pushed and shoved me inside so that she could get on the train. Some people got frustrated, but it was so unusual that I started laughing. I guess she was in a hurry.]

Other interesting oddities:

• Almost no one talks to each other – especially in the morning.
• Almost everybody has some sort of diversion with them. A book, newspaper, word-find, sudoko, walkman (er… ipod – jeez I’m old), laptop, whatever.
• No one moves once they sit down or find their standing spot.
• The few strangers who have talked to me on the subway have mostly just had something horrible happen to someone they cared about and were in shock.

Sometimes as I watch how people move when a stop is really busy, it is quite amazing. People swarm in several directions, but all flowing into a few areas that bottleneck – the escalator, turnstile, or train door. At first, I would find the lack of identity extremely off-putting. It used to disgust me, and give me the mental image of maggots clumping around something – but since I have grown to really find it extremely beautiful.

Now I find it much more very similar to watching cells flow in various directions through a microscope. Perhaps we are just cells in the body of some enormous entity. During each commute, I look around me in the subway and wonder surreally, ‘just how do all those cells know which way to go’?

Lately, I find myself feeling more open to being a part of this collective humanity. I don’t understand how we all fit together, but I get this feeling like we are all parts of a seamless whole.