Tags
How many people to know?, Know a few people well, Know many people and move on., Who can you enjoy most?
This evening I was in a conversation about why people change their city of residence so often. As it turned out I was the one who spoke up for living your life with the same people. My reasoning was based on the idea that knowing people for a long time gives you a much better perspective on the values of life that are important. When you know someone for a long time and in many different life situations, it becomes a more meaningful thing when something happens to them. If you are with the same people for a long time, you know when they meet their spouse, how and when they began a family. You know the baby as a baby, as a toddler, as a child, as a teenager, as a kid with problems, as a college kid, or a soldier, as a returning alcoholic, or a dedicated political radical, and after a while as an older responsible citizen trying really hard to pay off their home mortgage while helping their kids’ lives become somehow coherent. Knowing the same people for fifty-one years, as I did in my years in Berkeley, I saw all of those things and lots more.
One of my interlocutors had intentionally joined the US Air Force to see the world and stayed in that profession for twenty-eight years. They loved it because there were so many adventures to participate in, and so many interesting people to meet. All sorts of people, from all sorts of different countries. They loved the vast variety of people and those different people’s exotic world views.
I mentioned the Classic Roman Seneca (4 BC to 63 AD), who mentioned that everyone in Rome had come from somewhere else. That was strange to him, but then “all roads lead to Rome.” Then he goes on to mention that in every city that he visited the same situation prevailed, that everyone had come from somewhere else. He thought it strange and attributed it to humans’ natural wanderlust, the desire to see what’s over the next hill, or around the next bend in the road. He himself had been brought to Rome as a child, and then went on to Egypt as a teenager, and then back to Rome and on to Corsica in his late fifties.
I moved several times until age twenty-five, but always between places where I had family or within a well-known college community. Then I was at Berkeley, California, for fifty-one years and now in Bend, Oregon for eight years.
If you meet new people you meet someone who has done something, but if you know people for a long time you know people who are doing things. I guess I prefer people who have a known purpose in life and are pursuing their known goals.
There have been over ten billion people who have existed during my life and that’s far too many to have known.
I have known quite a few people and enjoyed them all, even the difficult ones.
Probaway - Life Hacks 