There are some things I write here on Daily-Ink, and when I read my own writing a month or two later I barely remember or even recognize my own writing. I wrote that?
But there are other things I write and I remember. There is one post in particular that I think about regularly. Tonight on (another) walk with my wife we reached an intersection where we were crossing the road. Perpendicular to us, on the cross street’s sidewalk, were two men who reached the intersection exactly the same time as us. We all slowed down to let each other pass. They were the only other people walking anywhere near us and sure enough we intersected at the one place our paths crossed.
Despite thinking about the following post regularly, I hadn’t actually re-read it in a couple years. I didn’t consciously remember that it also started with a walk with my wife, but what I do remember, what I reflect on when it regularly happens, is that we are somehow drawn to these intersections.
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October 27, 2021
Human intersections
Last night I went for a walk with my wife. Minutes from home we were walking on a quiet, empty street that doesn’t have sidewalks. Then a car approached from in front of us. We started to move to the side of the road, and noticed car lights coming from behind us as well. The cars crossed paths right where we were on the edge of the road, having had to slow down to cautiously make space for us and the other car. Then we continued our walk with no cars approaching us from either way until we arrived home.
I find it fascinating how we seem to be drawn, pulled to intersecting points with other people. For the amount of times someone walks by our house, or the front of my school when I arrive before any students, I’m amazed how often I have to wait for a pedestrian to walk cross the driveway before I can make the turn… amazed that as I wait, I can see no other pedestrians for an entire block.
In a car you are turning left and must wait for the one car coming the other way to pass.
At a shopping plaza you go to open a door to a store and the one other person in sight is coming through the door the other way.
On a path in a park, you are walking faster than the people in front of you, and as you go to pass them, other people are approaching from the other way crowding the path at your takeover point.
I think we find ourselves at these intersections at a rate that is greater than probability would suggest… The likelihood of such intersections happen far more than just by chance. Like magnets passing one another, there is a pull towards others, an unseen force that draws us into each other’s path. It isn’t a case of bad timing, it’s not that we are unlucky and forced to slow down, wait, or squeeze by someone else. It’s actually just the opposite. We naturally seek each other out on some unconscious level. We are drawn to human intersections.
