Living with Strangers

Living with strangers

It is a known fact that people salute each other in smaller towns or villages, just because it is so much easier for someone to remember a small amount of faces they see every day. Sometimes, getting a "Hi", even a dull one as the writer says, can lighten up your day. It gives you the feeling that you are being noticed.

Living in an urban area is a lot different. Big cities are homes to millions of people, so the chance to remember the people you see everyday is much smaller. Lets say you would actually remember everyone but you wouldn't have time to salute everyone and mind your own way to do your job. Meanwhile the chances to see weird things around you, is increased by the number of people in your town. The more the merrier.

The writer is telling how it is like to live with strangers. By seeing so many weird things around you, with time, you pass through different stages of reactions. At first you are somehow amazed while being impressed by the several types of behavior you encounter. The more you see the less you know and you just let it go around you. Like rain for example. Every person is a water drop that randomly appears in your proximity, but you don't do anything about it. You don't interact with it just because you're not interested. This is the final stage when you get used to the big town and you accept it in your life among with the people within it.

The first three short stories shared by the writer show typical urban behavior. People who are in a continuous hurry for something, old people who are lonely and feel like sharing their life experience with someone and people who feel offended by your behavior in public. These are all common things you see every day in a big city's public transportation and it can happen almost anywhere on the streets. But after all everything is part of our lives. Running past frustrated, happy, lonely, guilty, innocent people is something usual. It's nothing when you first think of it but it gets a lot more complicated when you come to think that maybe that stranger who was sad in the bus station might be the reason why you have a sad mood in a certain day. It affects you.

Getting back to the next issue written in the essay "Taking action is something that is best to be avoided". Due to the amount of personalities you can find on the streets, the result may vary and it's better not to put yourself at risk. I don't mean to sound harsh or to say that you shouldn't help someone in need but it's just best to stand aside or just pretend that it's not happening. Don't get involved if you're not certain about the result of your own actions. Regarding this topic, I could do nothing more than just agree with the writer.

Nevertheless, good things can happen as well. We can take the story about the writer's daughter as an