#cures boredom

[stixxandstoners]

So I Started Playing ..

Kim Kardashian: HOLLYWOOD ...& it's pretty straight. Gives me something to do like clash of clans lol

[furiousfurious]

There's something I do when I feel tired or bored or simply afraid I am not paying attention. I become an empathy detective.

Try it. You are on a busy but not overloaded subway car, or a street corner. Or maybe you are enjoying a coffee outside in the park or you are waiting in a restaurant lobby for a friend.

Find the person nearby you imagine yourself to least likely be friends with. Look, but don't stare. Notice the features their clothes, the details of their appearance that they have or have not paid attention to. Pay attention to things with text or images - it can tell you an affiliation, a way of life, an outward manifestation of the day to day. The smaller detail the better.

Then guess, approximately, what this person's story is right now. How would they describe themselves? Why are they on this train or at this street corner or at this restaurant? Where are they going immediately afterwards? Where did they come from? Who are the expecting to see in the next few hours?

Then: imagine they are the exact opposite of what you have just guessed at. You still need to make sure the small details match, but turn it on its head.

Instead of a high-powered lawyer, they are on their way to a job interview - the first in several months. Instead of an obvlious teenager bored and bopping their head to music, a nervous applicant for an arts school, listening to their favorite music to calm them down. Instead of a mother of two worried about what to make for dinner, an alcoholic rushing to the liquor store. Or maybe that last one is both.

What have you assumed in your original composite that makes your second guess so different?

Then let it go. You'll never know who they really are, the first or the opposite, unless you strike up a conversation with them. You don't have to do that. Trains and restaurants and street corners are not necessarily places where others invite conversation, for loads of good reasons.

But in act of observing, guessing and then questioning that guess you will have learned something more about the people around you than if you had just given them a passing glace. And you will likely have learned something about yourself.

Look at their face once more. Recognize the humanity in it, the possibility of both kindness and meanness. And then move on.