On Wednesday morning, my alarm was not the most disappointing thing I heard. Mother Nature welcomed me to the land of consciousness with the clanging of torrential downpour on my apartment’s tin roof. It was 8:30, a time I forgot existed, and I had to leave for a meeting in an hour. When people joke that pigs will fly when the sun doesn’t rise, this would be the day pigs fly. The sky was so monotonous; it was as if the gray clouds had beaten the sun into submission. The crackling thunder mocked me as I refreshed my email every 30 seconds, praying my meeting would be cancelled.
The meeting was not cancelled, and the rain actually got stronger, if anything. So while most of you slept or admired how warm and dry you were from inside your respective residencies, I ducked into what looked like post-apocalyptic Gainesville armed only with an umbrella.
Don’t worry; I’m not here to bore you with the details of this meeting.
But something amazing did happen that morning. The five or so people I passed while I moped under my umbrella all gave me dazzling smiles, as if reality was the rainy version of the “500 Days of Summer” dance montage.
I’m not usually so moved by smiling strangers, but I exchanged more smiles in that fifteen-minute period than I have in three weeks of walking around campus. Perfect strangers were grinning when they had the least reason to: through flimsy raincoat hoods in an early morning monsoon. These smiles may not have changed the course of my life, but they improved the quality of my day, the way a complimentary cup of coffee in winter might.
It made me wonder what my excuse was for being so self-involved throughout my day-to-day routine. Why do a majority of us act this way as we meander through crowds? There’s an almost imperceptible exchange between giving our thoughts and natural-bitch-faces precedence over our output, and not wanting to be the outlandish person that throws smiles around like beads at Mardi Gras to the perplexed public.
Since then, I’ve been paying more attention to the people around me.
It’s like the campus transforms into an airport, where quality people-watching and “one-serving friendships” (via Edward Norton in “Fight Club”) are real possibilities.
Let me tell you, among this crowd of bustling people trying to catch their next class, some people I’ve passed look really upset. Sure, the sound of sobs is enough to pull you out of zombie mode while commuting, but how many people do we unknowingly pass in a day that only show quiet signs of desperation?
Even if someone looks fine, couldn’t everyone benefit from some form of subtle friendliness? Especially since it’s becoming so uncommon? You don’t have to plaster a smile on your face and parade around to be effective, nor do you have to utter a word to spread a positive message. And until Wednesday morning when I got to my meeting and thought, “Wow, that was refreshing!” did I understand how much of an anomaly interaction between strangers is. That handful of people probably didn’t think much of what they were doing — they smiled so matter-of-factly and freely that they probably don’t realize that I’m still thinking of the whole thing as odd and awesome four days later.
So, here’s a new weekly challenge: Appreciate the people around you that you don’t know. Look up, smile and try not to be so self-absorbed (even if it’s a dismal, rainy Gainesville afternoon). You might just be surprised how it brightens up your internal forecast.
