People. I enjoy people.
That’s why the idea of sequestering myself in the wilderness, although appealing in a natural sense, falls short of my reality. For I need people around me to engage, to share, to enjoy. While I do find peace and beauty in nature, I find a requisite companionship in my fellow human beings.
Granted, some I don’t like so much. Others drive me crazy! But there are many, so many, who entertain me – consciously or not. For I am the observer, the interpreter, the inter-actor who draws meaning from the exchange. In a higher sense, perhaps overstated or claimed, I am the wise man, learning more from the fool than the fool can learn from me.
Some share love with me. These are closest, dearest to my heart — my wife and family. But also a young child who gives me a big smile or hug, or an elderly woman who expresses her appreciation of my appreciation of her.
I especially enjoy the casual connection. A woman on the other side of a rope in the Heavenly lift line, chatting easily, knowingly, about any particular thing before she rejoins her husband and moves with the line. A young vegetarian ruralist in the Santa Cruz mountains exchanges life philosophies with me on a deck eighty feet up a redwood tree. “Way to get the most out of it!” he says, after I swing in from a run where I’ve done a cannonball for speed, turned both ways, stopped short of the platform to take a few pictures, and climbed up to land at his side. “Isn’t that what life is about?” I asked. We went on from there.
Talking with people in the grocery store as if we’re friends or neighbors. Catching up with people at the gym before class starts. Life is best lived in the company of our brethren. There is a place for solo time, and indeed I utilize this: my need for “space,” as my wife refers while rolling her eyes. But my space would become very lonely, very quickly, without contact.
People. Gotta be around people.