Communication... It’s a one way thing?!

Out of the many noises I heard on the train this morning, the roaring sound of the engine firing up and blasting thousands of vaults of electricity through the rail line at every single stop, was definatly one of them. I also endured the odd cough and distinguished sound of many people quickly turning the pages of their newspapers in an almost rhythmic fashion, that seemed to get louder and louder which made me wonder if they were actually even reading their papers in the first place. As my eyes struggled to remain open, I took a moment to look around at all the other people on the train. I noticed that every single one of them were partaking in the exact same activity. They were all looking down, but not at nothing. No one was playing the ‘who would I be friends with if I could only see their shoes’ game, but instead everyone was looking down at their telephonic communication devises. Their phones, and if they weren’t looking down at their phones then they were clutching them tightly in their hands just in case someone at 6.45 in the morning decided to contact them. The people not looking down at their phones were doing 1 of either 2 things:

Number 1: They had instead opted to stare down at their tablet (another incredible invention of the 21^st century). 

Or Number 2: They had grabbed one of the lovely free newspapers to read - the newspapers that so often litter the entire train without a thought or consideration to any of the humans that had placed them there in the first place (why we bother - its beyond me)

Everyone was doing something. No one was doing nothing. No one was looking at anyone else, and the people who thought they were someone else weren’t looking at anyone else either. As I sat there thinking about how this could be a fantastic opportunity to meet new people and share one another’s stories (and of course contacts for the future) I starting to think to myself about how we got here? How did we get to this place where communication really is, just a one way thing. Even eye contact is a danger on the train. Is this how people use to behave? Is this how people have always behaved? Probably. Or perhaps maybe this is a ‘Con’ on the ‘Pro’s & Con’s list’ (that I have just mentally created) of the modern world.  And just when I’m about to give up all hope of the past and of ever communicating with anyone else ever again, something incredible happens.

All of a sudden as I sit there looking all around me for perhaps an answer to this delirious situation, I see someone. Someone in the next carriage, doing nothing! Well not nothing, but certainly something thats worth something. This person is not looking at their phone, nor their tablet or newspaper, but instead they are looking all around at the other people on the train, moving their eyes from seat to seat until they eventually meet their eyes with mine. They are looking at me. He is looking at me. I am sitting here, and he is sitting over there and he is looking at ME! Is he thinking what I am thinking? Doing what I am doing? He is certainly and very actively recreating what people in the past had no choice but to do. He is living his life through the use of a little well known communication devise I like to call ‘our senses’. Fantastic, finally I feel satisfied in knowing that someone else is taking a moment, to just do nothing, or at least to do something while they are doing nothing, something that involves positively doing nothing. 

…And then I see it, something terrible has appeared in my eye site. He is clutching his laptop so closely to his chest that it is almost unrecognisable as a laptop. He is still attached to the notion that at any one moment he can simply open it up, and become one of them. Join the rest of them. Maybe he feels liberated or even empowered by his decision to have his choices laid out in front of himself. Maybe this makes him empowered.

I saw this and stopped for a moment. I stopped, and then I got my writing book out. I put my writing book away and then I stopped again. I looked again, and then I stopped looking, gave up, looked down, and pulled out my tablet to start using the one way communication devise that we all know so well as…CANDY CRUSH! FAIL!

Maybe the truth is that sometimes we all need a little bit of one way communication, and maybe that’s not communicating at all, but maybe we don't really care enough to care anymore. Who knows...you decide!

Next time on Your Head Not Mine…  ‘insert here’ ….Tune in soon to find out whatever that is! BOOM!