This is an addition to my toilings and manifestos of 2019.
After decades of working and living at night, and completely discarding the morning, I have in recent years become what I always dreaded: a daywalker. I am very conflicted about this. First, and foremost, I longer work in a restaurant, and I no longer work with the general public. This has been a blessing for sure, because I find it much easier to be kind to people now that I am not forced to interact with them for a living. I've been relieved because I don't have quite the opposite schedule to my family. I don't miss being out at night, and I don't miss the late night weirdos either.
Despite all the good things, I still do not feel about the world and the people in it the way that I feel like I should. For instance, I was walking home from dropping off my little boy at school a few days ago. There was a train wailing on the whistle a few blocks down, there were two large excavation vehicles coming down the street, a military helicopter flying around beating the hell out of the air and some lousy jackass laying on his horn. I wanted to scream. After working at night for twenty years, I can tell you, it is never that fucking loud at night. And then there are those people who say that they love the morning, and that the morning is peaceful and promising. This has never, never, never been my experience. The mornings are loud, smelly, aggressive and the ideal time to lose all faith in humanity. I have always believed that those people who get up early tend to instigate economic ruin and start wars.
But I've tried to have a change of heart. I've been going through this thing where I'm trying to get involved with the day, the goings on of the day and the people who populate it. My wife, a very classic extrovert, will say that she feels a connection with people when we're in a large crowd. I do not feel like this at all. In a crowd, I'm always looking for an escape while I'm scanning faces to see which one is liable to perpetrate awful acts.
I will never be anything other than an introvert. I'm outgoing, I'll talk to anyone. I like the people I like and I want to be around them. When it's over and I'm home, I'm so worn out that I vow never to be around others again.
Compassion is another matter indeed. Wikipedia describes compassion this way:
Compassion motivates people to go out of their way to relieve the physical, mental, or emotional pains of others and themselves. Compassion is often regarded as being sensitive to the emotional aspects of the suffering of others. When based on notions such as fairness, justice, and interdependence, it may be considered rational in nature.
This gives me a great deal to think about. Being a waiter for years, I would not have cared about this. Having to interact with people was tough for me. I always just viewed the people I served as a $100 bill and it was a matter of how I would extract the money from their wallets to put into mine. I don't think all servers and bartenders feel this way. I'm sure there are some who legitimately like people, and enjoy being around them. Most people I worked with over the years were not like that. For most of them, their hatred for the people they saw everyday, including coworkers, increased exponentially every year.
I want to have a different view of others. I want to part of the tribe, even if I don't really want to talk to others. As the case of the working walk, with that kind of unnecessary morning noise, I have no compassion for others, not the guy blowing the train whistle, the drivers of the loud cars. And what really considered rational in nature?
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