Private Eyes Are Watching You

Tonight, I ran into a friend. An old friend, we're talking 23 of my 28 years. If I have an "inner circle" of friends, then she's in it. We started talking, and found that we're both encountering the same problems lately. Her situation is significantly different than mine, but I think it's possible that the cause of our problems are the same. She was telling me how she feels like she has no friends in Detroit. I told her how I've been feeling very isolated lately. Her situation is unique to mine in that she has a family, and she's a graduate student. My problems are similar, but related. I've always felt isolated. When I was younger, my grandparents (surrogate parents for my latchkey childhood) liked to take me out for rides in the country. They liked to go out and look for deer. They're birdwatchers, too, so they always enjoyed the trips. I was probably between 6 and 10 when I would go out on these rides. A boy that age should be allowed to get out and enjoy the countryside instead of watching it roll past. That wasn't what bothered me. What bothered me was how isolated I felt from the trees and the cornfields. I was worried about not knowing what it felt like to stand on the corner of Range Road and Rattle Run Road. Why was I worried? I didn't know. Now, I can't drive on a highway without feeling concern. We drive so fast trying to get to school or work or whatever that we don't think about anything besides the cars in front of us who don't know how to use a turn signal. Do you know your neighbors? I do, because growing up, I didn't know my neighbors, but I had yet to figure out how much it bothered me. Now I know how important community is for us. Yet, I do still feel isolated. My friend said she wants to know what it would be like to be a settler, to start from scratch. What if we took away the email, and the cell phones, and the cars with power-steering? What if we all had to work with our hands to survive? You would have to grow your own food, and learn to conserve for the winter. Imagine having no guns or surface-to-air missiles and not having a need for those things. Imagine no bio-, eco-, chemical-, or nuclear-terrorism threats. Henry David Thoreau's book "Walden" is all about living outside of the modern world, and what one can learn from it. That book either changed my life or ruined me forever. A road traveled by car is not a well-traveled road, it is a quickly traveled road. We need to slow down. Get outside of the car, and walk a mile down a road you drive on every day. Notice the houses, and the yards, smell the flowers if there are any. Life is not about working to live or living to work. Get up early, one day, and take the long way to work. Talk to your neighbors, invite them over for dinner one night. Plant a garden, and take good care of it. I'm not talking about some kind of 'getting back to nature' hippy-drivel, here, I'm talking about living in this world, not just working in it. I think my friend and I have the same problem: we need to slow down, and stop thinking so much about everyone and everything else, and start thinking about ourselves and the world we live in, and our relation to it. You're here on this planet, don't waste your life making a corporation richer or letting everything pass you by like so many cornfields.

Private eys are watching you, so go make something of your life in this world