Life in a Sardine Can and Other Observations

I live in a large metropolitan area as many seem to these days.  A recent check of a North Texas demographic report stated that there are an unconfirmed 5.4 million people currently calling themselves my neighbor.  If I chose to unleash my influence on the platform of Facebook, all these people could be my friend.  I choose, however, to remain an anonymous neighbor to these brethren.  The kind of neighbor who power slides his car into his garage sideways as the door barely opens and just as quickly hits the “CLOSE” button to avert any and all contact with the lives of others.  While I usually am not this violent at avoiding contact with others, it is a reoccurring fantasy. 

I believe this dynamic stems from continuous exposure to a lack of control in one’s life.  I’m sure that is what you are feeling – I’m a professional after all.  Here’s what’s going inside your head instead of mine for once.

·         You are inundated with constant information.

·         You feel that you get no break from the stress or constant demands of the world and others (primarily family).

·         You feel that you’re barely hanging on.

·         You hate that your text messages are constantly corrected by some ominous element of the Internet or Apple and that saddens you.

·         You find that when you return home from the grocery store, you only purchased enough food to get you through the next 3.7 days when you intended to buy food for the week.  In addition, you pretty much forgot to buy anything of substance you had intended to return home with.  However, you now have some serious new kick-ass salty snacks to eat in bed as you cry yourself to sleep.

·         You wake in the morning to meet your reflection in the mirror with smeared lipstick and runny mascara and find that it’s very difficult to shave without being distracted.

All of these feelings, and many more I haven’t mentioned, affect your life and your ability to power slide effectively into your garage with great fervor.  It would be wonderful to find the root cause of these feelings.  It would be even more wonderful to determine how to disable the messaging autocorrect feature to allow more belligerent texts and fluent cussing as the situation demands.  So what causes you to feel this way?  I’m almost convinced that your “nuts” but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt or this “chat” gets real short, real quick and that’s not how I roll.

A couple of things are probably beating you down.  Living in a population where you have everything at your fingertips and where you are provided the luxury of fighting over it at any point in time may take its toll.  On the one hand, coming up with a great idea to go out and do something really cool is almost always met with 3,586 people in front of you who had the same idea.  On the other hand, you have a most unfortunate tattoo you wish you would have sobered up long enough to have at least a thought of internal debate whether or not to proceed.  You live in a sardine can – pure and simple.  What are the byproducts of such a fate?  You are confined by the ebb and flow of your surroundings whether you like it or not.  While it is possible to bend over to tie your shoelace in a mosh pit during a death metal concert, it would present serious challenges to your mortality.  So goes the life in large areas. 

Road rage does not fascinate me at all.  In fact it makes me feel alive knowing that others are in just as much of a hurry to donate life-giving organs as I am.  I guess it is sort of a brotherhood, in the loosest form of interpretations.  The demonstration of road rage always causes me to wonder why someone behaves this way.  What does it take in the background to elevate aggressive action, especially actions against others?  The anonymity of the sardine can, of course.  We all look the same on the road.  We all have some casing of glass, steel, a ton of plastic and the State minimum in rubber depth surrounding our bodies.  While our bodies (chasises) are different our shells are generic, not unlike the covering of the innocent and lowly sardine. 

Moving closer to the vehicle on your bumper, we transcend into the mind of the driver:  Your inability to read my mind, my emotional state, my paycheck stub and my level of over-caffenation tells me you are an inconsiderate sardine – the worst kind of sardine ever plucked out of rural America and placed smack dab in front of me in the passing lane as you talk on your cell phone about how much you hate your boss and how much you think “Lost” was the biggest example of big budget television series “shark jumping” to end an aimless theme that drug on for years.  I must free you from yourself.  I will swerve into the inside lane/shoulder to try and cause you to regain consciousness and I will add a little light flashing for good measure.  This little added bonus involves some foreshadowing in that when I pass you, and I will, I will leave just enough space to allow a piece of onion skin to separate our vehicles.  As I pass, I will be confident that you now appreciate my allowing you to live another day on this earth and that every moment of your life going forward will be spent looking in your rearview mirror searching for my future presence.  Go in peace.  [Insert 5 minute highway interval here]

“HEY!!  Don’t try and pass in front of me Mr. Semi!!!”

What about the other sardine?  The one that was given new life and life abundantly by the “4x4 from hell” mentioned above.  What does it look like inside that shell of oblivion?  Perhaps the scene can best be set by establishing possible life cycle-defining characteristics of the driver.  How about a middle-aged young lady percolating with excessive demands on her non-existent spare time?  Her commitments, voluntary and otherwise, her job (hopefully), her family requirements, her guilt from having a gym membership card that is clearly a wallet accessory, her acceptance of the perception that the world thinks she is ugly, overweight, unattractive, unable to effectively comprehend the immense value of mastering the “Shake Weight”, her lack of all interest in the things that we are told make life worth living add up to a disenfranchised life at best.  Driving around this world with those saddlebags (purely a metaphor) is likely to harbor oblivion, on a good day!  Why would someone who is entrusted with all those nuggets care about who’s in their rear mirror?  Why can’t she appreciate the angst so tightly wound up for her in the monster truck a mere three inches from her trunk keyhole?  To quote a great co-worker I had in the ‘90’s: “Dude, if that was all I had to worry about, I’d be in tall cotton!!”

So what do we have here at play?  Perhaps it’s the idea that, as sardines, we have so much contact with others that we take them for granted.  We don’t need to worry about the quality of the contact because we have so much quantity to exploit.  Maybe the root cause stems from a lack of empathy that disappears in crowds and the bazillion agendas all competing, oftentimes, for the same set of resources (space, activity, roads).  In the midst of mob violence, people become quickly disconnected from their actions in pursuit of “letting off steam” because “my home town team won/lost the national championship.”  The universal sign of the sardine can is the picture of an overturned police car ablaze. 

Are the two characters above really so different when you think about it?  Their most common motive and epicenter for their behavior arises from an affixation on themselves.  To be quite honest, we all tend to have selfish motives and subsequent actions about 148% of the time.  So how does one attempt to keep from looking like the sardine next to you?  Great question!!   Well your 50 minutes are up.  I’d like to thank you for sharing your thoughts and I’d like to pick it up here next time.  You did bring your credit card this time?  The one that works? 

The only thing you CAN do is show those you come into contact with each day that you’re not your garden-variety  sardine (huh?).  This comes from a desire to thrive on the weird looks of others due to your outrageous actions toward complete strangers.   Examples include:  holding doors for others, asking people to cut in front of you in line, mowing your neighbor’s yard for them at 2:33AM, mailing anonymous letters to people you have “friended” on-line telling them they don’t know you but you are praying for them.  Basically, the quickest way to lose your little, tiny sardine scales and start looking different is to stop keeping score.  The heavenly portal has amazing technology and makes the TSA look like, well the TSA, so you ain’t bringin’ anything from down here up there!!  Leave the garbage in the garbage can where it belongs and focus on the cleanup part of this assignment down here.  We’re never going to have enough money, have all our wrinkles magically vanish away for just six easy payments of $49.95 (call now though) or raise perfect children.  We all have a ton of internal cleaning to do and the very act of cleaning is humbling, enlightening and cathartic.  By doing this, we do something that we are comfortable with and something that we are very talented in, focusing on ourselves.  The trap to avoid is doing so in an effort to distinguish ourselves from others – that puts you right back where you started on a self-aggrandizing agenda rollercoaster.   Rather, keep the focus on keeping secrets about what you do.  God already knows.  The gift of giving anonymously is a wonderful talent and perhaps one we should all work to improve.  However, giving covers a multitude of areas, not just monetary giving.  Your time especially, as we have referenced earlier, is one that is invaluable given our world today.  Finally, the giving of your prayers for others speaks volumes about where your heart is.  God’s providence is truly a blessing but to pray for others to receive His blessings as well shows spiritual maturity.  It says that you recognize that we’re all in the same sardine can and if I can shift my pectoral fin slightly and you are now able to rest, then it is all worth it because the “can” got better by my efforts, small as they may be. 

I think if the late George W. Bush could have said it best if he would have remarked:  “We all need to act more  empatharily towards one another, showing more compassionary attention for those who don’t know they need it.  Heh, heh.” 

Be Kind, Rewind,

The Distracted Guy - Squirrel!!!