Last night, I just couldn’t fall asleep. Somehow, I sensed it almost right away, that this would be one of those nights. The humidity is pretty high so that didn’t help.
For the longest time, I remained in bed and my thoughts kept wandering. I even thought about blogging, and what if I’d come up with a topic that everyone is interested in … I mean, really interested — so that they’d flock to my blog, waiting for the next post LOL ! In one way, it would be kind of cool — I’d get lots of comments to reply to. My next thought was ‘what would people really be interested in??’ If I knew the answer to that one, I’d really have it made.
When you live in a big place, you easily get the impression that they’re only interested in themselves and if you’re in a small village they seem to be interested in other people … their neighbours. The smaller the place, the higher the level of gossip. I remember a couple I used to know … each Saturday, they went to have supper with his mother, a few kilometres away from where they lived. She suggested to him that they should start taking a walk there instead of taking the car … so that perhaps the heavy supper would settle on their walk back. He thought about this, and said ‘no’, he couldn’t do that … not because he didn’t want to but because they’d had to walk past the farmer’s house and then the farmer would think they had been drinking and couldn’t take the car.
That little story goes to show how people care about other people’s thoughts in really small places … whereas in a big city nobody would care at all! Both concepts of living have their advantages I guess — the freedom of doing whatever you feel like in the big city, compared to the sense of security you get in the small place, where everybody knows one another. The loneliness that the anonymity could bring … you’re never as lonely as in a big crowd … the annoyance of constantly being judged in the little ‘fish bowl’, where people never forget.
I’ve tried them both. Well … not a really big city, of course but still … fairly big. My home-town is small … the mentality there used to be like the little village, almost. With the job I had, I knew a tremendous amount of people. Being away for a few years causes you to lose the grip and of course, as time goes by you age too. Once I moved back there after four years, and it took quite some time to get back into the swing of things … but I did, eventually.
It sort of tickles my mind to think about what it’s like to live in an immense city like New York City. I would think that when it’s such a huge place and so many people, it must be broken down to smaller units … blocks, perhaps. When you watch TV-shows like Seinfeld or DOC [the one with Billy Ray Cyrus] you easily get the impression that it’s all so friendly and they all know one another 🙂
colderweather2011 