“A table for one.” I enquire of a sharply dressed, good looking waiter, and am taken to the small table by the window of the small, cozy cafe in one of countless by lanes of London. I am here for no particular reason. I wanted to step out of the house, maybe perhaps in the want of some fresh air, or maybe to cheer myself in the gloomy, overcast British weather. I do not know. But it has become one of my favourite things to do. Visiting cafes and coffee shops, carrying my laptop and a book, and enjoying being lost in the crowd, by myself, in a sea of overheard conversations and the unfamiliarity of faces of strangers who I will never meet again. There is a comfort in this anonymity, a calming feeling of catharsis, where I become one with the strangers in the room.
This comfort exists, not only in a coffee shop, but also anywhere where I am surrounded by strangers, each of us minding our business, while for a brief, ephemeral moment, our lives intersect and blend as we pass each other in the grocery store aisles, or queue behind each other waiting to be served, or just as a un-intentioned fly on each other’s play as we sit in park or or along the river. For every transient moment shared with each of the stranger, I am reminded for all the uniqueness of every stranger there is a likeness that unites us.
There is a word in French for what I’ve described above: Flâneur. It refers to a person who is a “loafer”, “stroller”, or a “lounger”, whose purpose is nothing but to sit and observe people and things around. The word has been borrowed into English and is now synonymous with “people watching”. This time, as I sit in my corner of the cafe, as a flâneur, I can’t help but be immersed in the conversations around me. There is no attempt to eavesdrop; I am just inundated with the floating words, some in languages I understand and some in the ones I don’t. There are incomplete stories whose endings I will never know and overheard snippets of conversations between strangers lend an air of familiarity while being alien at the same time. I sip my coffee, and breathe it all in.
The door for the cafe opens again, bringing the cold, nippy air in that heralds the arrival of autumn and making the cozy indoors momentarily chilly. “Summer has truly gone, isn’t it?”, I overhear, as someone proceeds to order their coffee. And I am pulled into another train of thought. Being in London, one thing that everyone does is talk about the weather. The weather offers the perfect foil to begin a conversation: From “Oh so lovely” to “Welcome to London’s perennial cloudy and despondent weather”, the spectrum covers it all and becomes the common denominator in countless casual conversations.
Wherever I may be, if I allow my mind to wander and thoughts to drift, there is a unifying theme in all the conversations around me. Whether it is in the grocery store, the guy checking-off the items for that recipe while being on the phone with his mother, or it is two friends discussing what is the next movie to watch as they sip their coffee or a group of colleagues talking about what’s good and what’s not at the office at the food market during lunch or the couple planning their next vacation over a casual walk along the river. And as the dimensions of time and space blur and meld into each other, I realise that in another time and space, I have been each of those strangers, talking about my life with strangers as my unsuspecting and un-intentioned audience.
In one big moment, all the conversations and the distinct lives of all the strangers blend into one, as I realise the stranger is me.
Hat tip for inspiration:
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/article/people-watching-in-paris
https://twitter.com/gokulns/status/1573733881412452355?s=20&t=VNnxCYBOTCmDivZLrYTQLw
