A Trivial, Scary, and Beautiful Thought

I like to use "She" when the gender is not specified. So I'd rather you think about the person I'm describing without taking her (their? their is so awkward) gender for granted.

This happened as I was walking down the street with my suitemate Noah Sheinbaum. He showed me a hotel next to the study that I had never seen before.

It made me realize that right here, less than 100 meters from where I live, there's a world people go into and come out of -- a world that I had been completely unaware of. There's someone who has a middle management position that comes in in the morning, is in a good mood sometimes, likes some of the people she's managing, hates some other things in others, has thoughts and private judgments about the customers, etc.

She probably doesn't have these exact thoughts and feelings, but she has things she cares about as much as I care about the things that I care about. She has problems, and small and big things that make her happy.

It's such a stupid thought, it's so trivial but there's something about it in that specific moment that made it hit me with its full thrust. It's not a realization, something I had never thought about before. But I saw it more clearly than I had in a while.

The idea is that I'm just one among tons of people who have walked this earth or who have walked it, and my ideas, thoughts, passions, problems matter no more than any of any one of them.

I'm not clear on what to do with that, but my friend Lawrence Lim calls it the "decentering of the ego." I like this term a lot.