Look around.

See the faces, the people nearby. The man with his headphones and laptop, the guy to my right, working on some paperwork having just finished speaking to a friend of his, the lady in the corner focused on her red notebook. The baristas, they clean and perform tasks as we ignore and go about our own actions. The maintenance crew polish the floors at Noah’s Bagels across the way, the chairs are up, the day is done. The Asian woman who just left the building, she brought in her A-frame haircutting advertisement, and is now gone until the morning. I think of a reporter acquaintance of mine, in Prague with her husband for 10 days. I ponder about the few friends on Facebook, leaking clues as to their expected travels to aid after the recent Earthquake so far away. My mind slips to the life of an ex-best friend who now lives and goes to school in Alabama. I haven’t spoken to him since we departed junior high. And then there is a quite new friend of mine – a middle age fellow struggling to make a living. He has had to move out of his shared apartment for lack of money – and no longer does he have a cell phone, and he can only use the public library for wireless internet. He attempts to sell his Oregon photography, but the profits just aren’t enough. He now shares a place with an older man who has suffered a stroke and needs help around the place. He does not deserve to go through such difficult times, nor does anyone. There is so much more… And the list could never end.

Sometime I get caught up in it all, and as I write, my music hums in my ears, and artificial voices from rhythms and moods set me in a trance, and I step back to live to tell the tale of others.

I sit here, having ingested my usual coffee, basic research for homework completed, at a small two-person table spotlighted by a bright fixture above, and I blog. I blog about my motions of the emotion variety because it just means that much to me. Writing, I feel the ability to exhibit so much more than if I could, or would, ever speak it to someone.

But sometimes it feels so relieving to stop, look around, and recognize those around you. Look at the work they do, consider the lives they live, what’s on their mind, how they feel, who they are. Something so simple can be so complex and difficult to comprehend. It’s quite settling and it seems to almost ground you. So often we power through our lives and we fail to acknowledge such diverse souls in this coffeehouse, this building, this city block, and so on. But when you forget about yourself and focus on others, there becomes such a driving desire to know the world.

I question my cookie-cutter life. When I step back from the trance of each day, I crave to revolutionize the way I live; Such an example being my weight loss or efforts to volunteer in Haiti. Perhaps eyebrows raised when I started publishing my ambitions to travel to the scene of such a disaster. But I crave to find myself – to understand my abilities. In our everyday lives, we put our minds, souls to such little use. I want to attempt crazy, to make a change, and maybe I will find my sane.

I want to see the world, adapt to the unknown, feel the end of my desires, and understand contentment at the end. My life is young. I want to be free, because for so long I have struggled to be something other than myself.

Look around and you will see… There’s something more than you and me.