At home and travelling at the same time

We are not islands and don’t live in islands. The occasional sense of solitude arose from the difficulty of gauging our distance with the world, the near being far and the far being near.

In the subway, surrounded by commuters going to work by the same subway line as we do, we couldn’t wait for a decent social distance to be restored between us. With the crowded rush-hour train refusing to grant us our wish, we could only stay indifferent, a.k.a. courteous when being among total strangers, while protecting the final piece of tiny flimsy private space. But hey, we weren’t complaining, considering what those commuters pushed into the train by the platform stewards had to go through.

The mobile communication devices that follow us here and there all the time did the job again, splitting the indifferent crowd and opened a way that took us to the neighbours a little bit further. I’ll arrive in 20 minutes, sorry to keep you waiting. Sports news from America, the reality show hoax of the Netherlands, and the latest whereabouts of state leaders, all at our fingertips. Somehow the headlines rushed into our short-term memory, while fellow travellers 20cm from us were silent all the way through, until the terminus parted us.

It was still not the end of the story. We did travel with them for a little longer, this time on a conveyor belt moving at constant speed. You look familiar, have we met before? Oh yeah, you were the guy in a suit that was standing next to me when I chopped onions and carrots on Cooking Mama. I did have a glimpse of you (or, rather, your newspaper) and was as familiar with the latest plots of our favourite soap as you were. See ya, Mr Won’t-see-you-again.

Yes, we are living in an information-overloaded city, but we still choose to overload ourselves with the world thousands and hundreds of kilometres away on our PDA, or an imaginary world somewhere in our NDS. Otherwise we run out of talking points and imaginations.

We never know the names of our “near neighbours” near our homes, on the train or on the bus. The solidarity demonstrated by true “communities” in the older areas can only be envied. Hey, don’t we all aim to move to a bigger house, just like everyone else (or so we believe)? Then neighbours and fellow travellers are just that, travellers, travellers that come and go. And are you not, am I not, travellers, at home and travelling at the same time?