Human Interactions

I've been thinking for quite some time about the nature of human interactions. As you know, I am obsessed with knowing (which is different from meeting) people, and you may not know I like to peer into other people's lives, and let them peer into mine. That is what constitutes the significant moments of our lives. So I have come up with a sort of theory, which follows:

We all lead our lives, with our habits and our routines, and in general most of us repeat a lot of the same things over the days. And we all lead our lives in our mind and heart, thinking and feeling through our days. That thought and feeling process is what I choose to call consciousness.

Now think of this proposition: this life we lead is on a three-dimensional plane, where the 3 dimensions are space, time, and consciousness. We are all, to some extent, like rays (i.e. geometric rays) flying in a 3-D plane, each with our own unique trajectories. The content of those rays is our consciousness: what we think, what we are aware of, who we are, how we view the events in plane we’re traveling inside of. We have routines, and as long as we live by those routines we’re flying in straight undisturbed lines. Those routines are, to name a few, the routine way in which we take a shower, walk to class, sit in our usual chair in a classroom, or talk of the same topics with the same people, over and over again. I’m not condemning this, I’m just saying that they are all part of a routine which doesn’t change and therefore doesn’t affect our trajectories. When we go through a day where nothing special happenned, we fly a straight, undisturbed line.

Then once in a while an unplanned event happens, a dent in the straight line: you crash into somebody else’s ray, and that intersection, because it was unexpected, disturbs the normal course of events. Perhaps you were supposed to go finish homework, but a friend from elementary school studying in Japan you hadn’t heard or thought of in 5 years runs into you on the street, and you decide to have coffee. What I mean by “crash into someone else’s trajectory” is that you have an unexpected interaction with someone that surprises you and changes the direction of your ray.

For example, as happened to me one morning in the Montreal Trudeau Airport. I was expecting to sit down, wait for the Customs officer to call me, fill a slip of paper, answer some questions, get my passport stamped, and get in my plane. Instead, here's what happened: I walked in the Secondary Inspection Customs office and a French guy was already waiting there. He’d been waiting for a rather long time and was understandably sore about it. When I came he spilled his heart out, complaining about the fact that the Customs stopped him for a stupid reason (he’d made a spelling mistake filling an airport card) and his problems with American customs in general. He then told me about how he entered the US eight years ago on a tourist visa, got married, and was given then denied the Green card because he got married in an illegal situation. Then he told me he was in Montreal for his cousin’s wedding, that he was Basque (people I love and admire for their strength), and had since divorced from his American wife.

Do you understand what happened? In those brief minutes two improbable people's (a Basque and a Moroccan in Montreal, how probable is that?) ‘rays’ had unexpectedly intersected. What strikes me most is that that discussion was sincere and unimaginably dense. As I like to imagine in my mind, two distinct rays intersected, folded into one same trajectory for a small period of time, and had deep insight about each other during that period. At that precise moment (time) and place (space) we had met and I was peeking into his consciousness.

Now to take this point farther, I ask myself the question “What is the effect of an interaction?” Obviously, there’s the fact that I’m still wondering how this outspoken Basque guy is doing two months later. More importantly however, when an interaction is sincere (not small talk like that “the weather sucks” bullshit), the two rays’ trajectories are affected by each other. Granted, the example with this Basque guy isn’t a very good one. I mean apart for the fact that we shared a problem and a few good laughs about American customs, he’s insignificant. However, I have a very good example in store to illustrate a major ‘ray collision’:

Last summer, in a typical Othman-at-Paris adventure, I came out of a subway car. To make things simple, let’s say my subway was headed north, and the opposite subway would have been heading south. I made intense eye contact with a beautiful girl standing on the opposite direction (therefore heading south). We were both overwhelmed by each other’s presence and couldn’t take our eyes off each other. I crossed to her side of the subway hoping to meet/approach her in some way (I still have no idea how I would’ve approached her). Unfortunately, to reach her I had to go through an underground tunnel, breaking the eye contact between us, and by the time I got there she had already entered her subway car. We made eye contact again when she was leaving, and to make a very long story short, I took the next train in her direction and followed her hypothetical trajectory for about 50 km out of Paris, not knowing where she was going but hoping fortune would land me there. I know what you’re thinking, I'm crazy, but remember I’m a romantic. Besides, that’s not the point...

What I’m saying is that the brutal honesty and sincerity of our very short connection (no words spoken and not more than a few seconds long) so profoundly stirred us that we couldn’t take our eyes off of each other and I followed her train not knowing where she would get off, for about an hour or so. That is what I call a major intrusion in the trajectory of a ray. She completely screwed up my mind, my plans, and my schedule for that day. And I can still remember that girl from July 15, 2005 at the St. Michel station about five months later (though it’s true there are a lot of women that I remember). My point is that there was an unexpected collision of our rays: I made eye contact with a beautiful girl and we were both interested in each other, and as a result both of us were considerably shook by the collision of our two rays.

And I’d like to take my point just little bit further (for the last time, I promise). I’ve illustrated the fact that whenever these intersections happen we never remain unaffected (unless you’re a heartless robot). Depending on the nature of the experience, we are marked more or less profoundly. Now take this last metaphor:

First consider the physical principle that anything with a mass exerts some gravity. Now imagine that we are little meteors flying around in outer-space in our respective trajectories. Our mass exerts minimal gravitational attraction on other objects, and can therefore affect the flight of other rocks. Now, I believe that the more an interaction is sincere and charged, the greater our mass becomes and the more we affect each other’s trajectory. The beauty is that sometimes we are so sincere and the interaction is so profound on our masses that we attract, and never quite separate again. And that, in my most humble opinion, is perhaps what they call love.