Lost in Observation

One of my favorite sources of pleasure

Yesterday I went out to shoot some photos. My favorite subject is people, humans. There’s nothing like the facial expression, or body posture, of someone who doesn’t know they’re being photographed.

But something weird always happens -- after a few shots, I just forget to take pictures. And I get lost in observation. 

I can’t really say what catches my attention; these things are hard for me to write about after the fact. It’s ordinary moments of ordinary people, nothing striking, or particularly eye-catching. Nothing impressive. Just humans going about their lives, existing. They may be seated in front of me in a waiting room, or mindlessly walking to their gate at the airport, or gesticulating while on the phone. Uneventful stuff to most. Interesting to me.     

Observing people is one of my favorite sources of pleasure. Just sitting somewhere and watching. I’m not a very social person, I don’t like being around people. Not actively, that is. Like, listening and responding and being careful of not oversaying or overstepping imaginary lines. I do like observing humans, though. I could spend hours studying them, constructing narratives of their lives, imagining their thoughts, their histories, their plans. No judging, just observing and fantasizing. But at a distance. If I engage with them, my imagination stops and the magic vanishes. It’s as if -- without knowing it -- they suddenly lose the relaxation that is essential to be what they really are. “Tension is who you think you should be. Relaxation is who you are”, says a Chinese proverb. So, if tension takes over, the flow of interesting information coming my way stops. 

And it has to be when they don’t look at me, when they do something else. One of the best places to do people-watching is on the train, because when they travel, people think. And when they think, they get more interesting. Not necessarily on transportation means, though. People get in this mysterious state even when preparing to travel, like at airports or train stations. I don’t know what it is exactly, but there’s something about humans in transit, minding their own business and producing thoughts. Something authentic and innocent, inviting and revealing, honest and transparent. These things transpire, and they somehow talk to me. And I could write books, right then and there, with such abundant material. 

There’s this idea that facial expressions are the result of every single instant of someone’s life, as if all of them have been etched onto their skin in layers, one on top of the other. This is not mine; I forget where I read it, but it was written somewhere. I would argue that this is the case with body posture too, with the way one moves. 

And so when I observe people I like to rate their interestingness. I like to assess whether the mere sight of them makes an impact on my curiosity, and, if so, whether I want to conjure up a story for them. 

I’m always taken aback at the request to describe what I see when I’m lost in observation, and why it pulls out my thoughts like a magnet. Give us some examples, some stories you made up, some pictures you painted in your head when you saw someone interesting, the very few who know of this obsession of mine often ask. But it’s hard for me to do that. These thoughts come and go at the speed of light, or -- rarely -- get stored in a (very) short-term memory where they survive for just a few hours before they’re gone forever. And, at the risk of sounding like a fraud, I respond that I don’t remember, that unless I find a way to write them down in real time, as they occur, there’s no way for me to re-capture them. And it’s unfortunate, but that’s all there is to it. 

I could write about a green-eyed girl with bright red hair, a universe of freckles on her face and a nose she probably did not want, absently scrolling through her social media feed while replying monosyllables to questions from who might be her mom, or aunt, or even an elder sister. Questions she doesn’t want to be asked. Not exactly the life she thought she signed up for. But that would be a vague memory of something I saw at the gate while waiting for boarding, a reminiscence of a thought that’s gone for good. And I don’t even know whether that’s what I actually thought about that very moment, looking at that scene. And it would feel like faking it. So, I’m not giving examples -- it would be pointless.

Interesting people are not interesting because of what they do or have -- that’s not who they are. Interestingness has nothing to do with one’s achievements or the approval of others -- who are, after all, easily deceivable; it has nothing to do with reputation -- which, as someone said, “is something that people with courage can do without”. Interesting people are interesting for what their being emanates, for all the layers of life -- any life -- etched onto their skin, for how fast their eyes adjust to emotions. 

I do realize that this whole interestingness thing is highly subjective, and that it’s a matter of imagination and curiosity and patience (yes, patience -- observing people is not something to do in a hurry). But what could possibly be more interesting than a human life, moving and talking and gazing and thinking right in front of you? 

Bertrand Russell, in his 1930 book “The Conquest of Happiness”, talks about zest, the genuine interest in as many things as possible that happy individuals have over unhappy ones¹. 

Am I to consider myself a happy person, then? Despite what Russell wrote almost a century ago, my view is that happiness cannot be objectively gauged by how many different interests one has. I’m definitely not writing this piece to link my interest in observing people to my happiness, if any. 

The thing is, though, that when I stop and sit and lock my eyes on someone that I (almost unconsciously) find observable, and therefore interesting, to the point of making up all kinds of stories inside my head on their life and whereabouts and what have you, I do feel good.

And good -- happiness or not -- is enough.  

1. And at some point, he says: “How extraordinarily different, again, are the attitudes of different people to their fellow men! One man, in the course of a long train journey, will fail entirely to observe any of his fellow travelers, while another will have summed them all up, analyzed their characters, made a shrewd guess at their circumstances, and perhaps even ascertained the most secret histories of several of them. People differ just as much in what they feel towards others as in what they ascertain about them”.