The other day I was sitting in a coffee shop waiting. I had, for once, no book, no music, just nothing. So I sat and I watched people; it’s a somewhat slightly sinister past time, but you would all be lying if you said you did not do it. How else do you get to see someone walk into a lamppost, or notice a blossoming romance? People watching is very entertaining, I’m well on my way to solitary crazy cat lady status already, so happily watching people is just another stitch in the knitting for me. I’m not ashamed to admit I’m a people watcher.


 

 But my crazy cat lady status is only half what this article is about, it’s unfortunately not some profound revelation about the nature of people or the beauty of interaction, nothing so ponderous I promise. If you want one, the most I can give you, is that people do odd things when they’re nervous. This is not the point however, my point was, that I ended up sitting directly across from an old lady, also sitting alone. The difference between her and I was that she looked so intensely serene. She was completely oblivious to the world inside the cafe; instead she just stared out of the window, smiling to herself. It was the complete antithesis to me, who, I will concede was having a teenage style internal melodrama. It made me consider (and this bit is the profound part I promised didn’t exist) that in life that there is always a balance, the existence of Yin and Yang etc, light and dark.

For example, one idle Tuesday I was staring out of the window while in a particularly boring seminar, and from the window of my seminar I could see all three stories of a building across the courtyard. In the bottom window there was a couple breaking up, waving arms, shouting, tearful hugging, all very messy; on the floor above there was a couple serenely embracing staring out of the window. It seemed so staged I did look for the hidden camera, but it aptly surmises the point of the article that there is a balance with everything, which brings me back to my general philosophy that everything happens for a reason. It helps with everything if you think that for every action there is a reaction, that for everything bad that happens, there is something else good in the world making someone else happy. In this reasoning, I hope that everyone can reach that kind of serenity, when I am her age I hope that can look that serene and happy when staring out of a window. It’s so Disney, but it’s acceptance of experiences that gives us wisdom and the power to look back over things calmly. That is the crux of this article.