Living elegantly among crowds
I find it interesting that setting up a protective personal barrier transforms the joy of talking to strangers and making connections in unexpected places.
These days I am melancholic about how talking to strangers is getting more and more difficult with each passing year. Is getting bitter and crude the only path forward from this age on?
Then I figured there is a joy to discover, of how we set up a barrier around ourselves and how we choose to be visible when we transgress it.
There is an art of remaining elegant in the crowd of the city.
Big cities are chaotic. If you are living in one such city, you know. There is something about sharing a tight space with a crowd of people. It doesn’t matter if the crowded place is a street or a public venue reduces people in it into an insignificant component of a whole, small and interchangeable.
Transformed by the imposition of the crowd, people transgress rules and boundaries, forcing others to develop their ways of dealing with the chaos.
Some people hack their way through the concrete jungle, disregarding others and creating the much-needed space through force and willpower. I think they get results and create a breathing space for themselves but the trade-off is too high as that symbolical hacking requires too much energy.
This attitude reduces one’s experience of the social life of the city into a tale about obstacles, which is admittedly very much two-dimensional.
Others, affluent folk, retreat to posh neighborhoods and gated communities, in the hope that by surrounding themselves with people of the same status, they will forge a better experience of the city for themselves. This is an illusion, as the upper class has as many transgressors and boundary breakers. Rich people do not make money by pleasing people and creating venues of peaceful cohabitation, so problems of a chaotic city ensue in these neighborhoods.
The “us vs them” mentality, laid by class divisions in action, is at work in these neighborhoods, which promotes a single-minded elitist individual. It is very much against what the city represents; a gathering of differences. The affluent response is self-righteous, and in my view, not elegant.
How to live elegantly in a chaotic city?
Then, let’s ask the obvious question: How does one remain elegant in a busy city?
I think of an individual with an open attitude, willing to approach the experiences that the city provides without preconceptions. Elegance involves some degree of trust in people, or a conscious decision to interpret their words at the most positive context possible. An elegant person has a better likelihood of finding the beauty in the unexpected, and the essence of universal humanity in the small talk with a stranger that is walking through a different path of life.
Elegance does not require money. A street sweeper who approaches the people sitting on the bench kindly before sweeping the nearby area is elegance embodied. Or a courier who has dealt with various kinds of characters only to still believe in starting a conversation with a stranger on the street.
No, dismissing the city life, and seeking refuge in artificially structured spaces is not elegant. The elegant resident is someone who knows the dangers, or possible friction points that can arise when you go out to the street. Elegance does not mean pushing ethical concerns in a secondary position. Elegance is acting instantly and intervening in a situation upon the first sign of tension coming to a boiling point.
Our attitudes towards sharing the city with others give away our personal ethics. Respecting the rights of others is an obvious requirement for being ethical, but I sense that instead of a dismissive acknowledgment of others’ rights, one can take a step further and review one’s personal experience through introspection that focuses on our shared similarities in sharing the city we live in.
In a city context, elegance is a willingness to get dirty, while acting from a place of respect and compassion towards others in the city.
The joy of talking to strangers
I remember when my sister visited me for the first time in the small town in upstate New York that I went to college at. She was visiting the local Target when she stood looking at the goods unaware that her cart was blocking the aisle. Someone had approached her and loudly said “Excuse you!” She quickly moved the cart, but she was surprised and a little hurt that the warning had come out in a confrontational tone.
She was not familiar with the in-your-face attitude of New Yorkers. Back in İstanbul, in a similar situation, she warns the person blocking the aisle, but in a reserved and polite way. The directness of the warning makes the interaction stand out as an intervention. And being intervened in is emotionally upsetting.
Her, and by extension mine, approach to dealing with the chaos of the city, is not confronting it head on, and in a way adding up to the chaos.
There is a different approach possible. One that allows her and me to remain elegant and navigate the social life of the city with a smoother sense of flow. It’s the tactic of dealing with things indirectly, by setting up a perimeter around oneself that creates a distance from all others around you, sort of like a buffer zone that absorbs the chaos.
So I came to the conclusion that setting up a barrier is essential to navigating the city elegantly.
What I find interesting is that setting up a barrier transforms the joy of talking to strangers, that pleasant feeling of making connections in unexpected places and situations.
Produce markets are great for testing the joys of making connections. I sometimes give unwarranted recipes to strangers I shop from the same stall, trusting their goodwill. It usually goes well. These short conversations are sort of unstructured social interactions, where the protective barrier is still in place, but the environment (the hustle and bustle of the market) creates a setting for those who are willing to display how they go out of their protective barrier and talk to someone new.
This is the elegance of living in a city filled with strangers, yet still being able to interact with compassion with others: developing an art of transgressing one’s own protective barrier and being willing to be seen while doing so.
With solidarity,
Deniz