Those battalions of strangers

Have I said this before?

When I used to live in London – decades ago, dear children, when the world was young and giants still walked the Earth – I found myself wondering at the sheer number of people. In particular, this (very lonely) feeling of puzzlement would grab me on the up escalator of tubes, as I looked at the endless stream of people on the down escalator.

Who are they all?
Where are they going?
Where do they come from?
Why?
How can there possibly be so many of them?
Is it really true they all have lives – external and internal – like mine, lives that mean to them what my life means to me, lives that they think important and meaningful

and

what does that mean with regard to my life

and the way I believe it important and meaningful

?

Obviously, dear children, I, like the world, was still young then, and the reality-notion that my life was only important and meaningful to me – that it was totally subjective a thing, that I could disappear pfft and nothing really would change – was frightening, at the time.

Sorta used to it now, k? Takes more than that to scare me now, I can tell you that for free ("I'm hard, I felt nowt"). I am, however, sometimes still weirded out, often quite woundingly, by the reality of the existence of other people, and not just their reality; their incredible fragility, the touching realness that fragility gives them. I want to gather them all, like I were some great big cosmic mama, you know, safe under my wings and say, it's okay, it's okay, honestly, you don't need to be so scared, I see you and it's okay.

I would, of course, be lying. None of it is "okay", really, when one thinks about it; but perhaps the issue is seeing and being seen – perhaps that is what makes the difference, the encounter with another, without which we do not fully exist.

I don't know.

My older son, who was Baby Jesus when he was a small child (things have moved on since then, you'll be relieved to know), used to say as I was putting them to bed "mummy, see me". Over and over again.

I really, really don't know.