Life on a double-decker bus (or The birth of pop homemade psychology)

Being jobless has its positive sides. Since I have been not working, I have started enjoying lots of things I would have never considered before. Having more time to spend on your own makes you realize how many little things can make you happy. I wish I could live in a World where I wouldn't have to work or rush or be in a hurry all the time. I wish I could live in a World where I could still stop in the middle of the street to observe trees and birds and flowers, or just spend an entire day reading a book on a bench. Maybe if all the people weren't working so much to make their livings, they would care more about relationships. Yesterday I was on the bus and I was observing people. People amaze me every time. The bus is a peculiar social environment where you can observe people who are almost totally unaware of you. That is a totally in my favor as I can carry on my silly, poor, pop psychology surveys any time I want. Most of people on a bus would be on their mobiles. Scrolling a social network home page or updating their status with tens of hashtags, texting, calling or playing Fruit Ninja and Temple Run. You can tell it when someone is playing Temple Run as they would swing their mobile phone up and down and left and right, with very concerned expressions on their faces. Italian families on the bus are most of time on their mobiles AND talking to each other. They share out loud all the major Facebook news and status updating. Most of all, they would talk about someone they DON'T like, because that's the way we do. They spend dozens of half hours chatting about him cheating on his wife or her wearing those expensive, posh, ostentatious and bitchy -resented- clothes and shoes. Italian tourists on the bus would compare every single little thing they see out of the window with something they've already seen in Italy. Always so proud of our Country only when we are abroad. Mothers and sons are my second best observation target. I promise every single woman who comes up into the bus with a child would struggle to keep him or her in the buggy. There must be something in buses that arouses children curiosity to death. As soon as mummy pushes the buggy in the corner, Jr. has been fighting with the seatbelt and unfastened it and sneaked on the floor already. Here we are. Let the war begin. As soon as the woman realizes what just happened and grabs the child in her arms, the child would start yelling and crying out loud all his tears. Among the general disappointment, the poor mum feeling totally under pressure as everyone would be staring at her in a look of dismay, she would eventually let the child wiggle out of her arms. Now, don't think I am sort of a psycho obsessed with what people do or don't do on the bus. In all this chaos, all I wanted to do was sitting there, reading a book. Circumstances has forced me to review my priorities. How was I supposed to survive among all this yelling and talking and mobile phones beeping - other than let them entertain me?

One

It's been one month already since I've moved to Dollis Hill. Everything now looks more familiar. The silence in the streets, the rows of semi-detached houses framed with green gardens and black gates, the small food stores in the corner. The first time I've stepped out from the tube station the sun was slightly going down in the late afternoon. My life was a complete tabula rasa. I was like a child who sees the world for the first time. Any small discover filled me up with joy, especially when it was about knocking on a stranger's door. In one month, day after day, I've started filling my life up with the new people I met. New eyes, new laughs, new stories. I've fallen asleep and woken up in a new house for the first time. I've seen the sun going behind the horizon from new windows and I've also seen the sun rising from a double-decker bus. I wouldn't change any single day of the last month. This is where my adventure has started. This is where I've decided to stand still for a while and see what life has to give me. Like a stone in the middle of the river, I stand still with eyes wide open as the water brings twigs and dead trees down to the valley.

The last month has flown away but with an intensity in feelings that is hard to explain. Some things would have taken an entire lifetime to happen somewhere else. I would have reached the same level of consciousness maybe in ten years if I had kept on leading the same life I was living before moving here.   My professor at LJC keeps on telling me that I write with too much passion, too many feelings. "You're from Italy, I know you like to do philosophy. But here, we're simple: describe what you see. And stop  your writing there." He's right, probably my writings go a lot round the houses before getting to the point, but this is how I see life and it costs me such an effort to cut the words down! I wonder what he might think if he read my blog. For sure I'm not the grind of the class, but I'm taking the most out of it, too. Maybe it won't be my way to become a travel writer, or maybe yes, nobody knows. But for today, I want to leave the future apart and just be grateful for all I've had until now. Starting from my dinner, which is in the oven right now.

Connections

How much time do we spend in pursuing our virtual identity? How much time do we spend in selecting which picture to use as a profile picture - how to write our status to make it as more attractive as possible to the majority of people? How clever we think we are in using smiles and emoticons to blur the edges of what we would really like to say? I'm afraid sometimes we just hide from truth. Today I had an amazing experience, something that never happened before to me. I decided to join a friend in  a free-hugging event. Yesterday we prepared our papers and today we were ready to join all the Focallocal guys in Trafalgar Square. That's not much a big deal, apparently: you just have to show up there with a paper saying "Free Hugs" and walk among people, move towards them and just...hug. But the actual deal is much more than just that. To me it has meant quite a lot. I don't know if it was because of the gorgeous location - Trafalgar Square and the National Gallery are two of my favorite spots ever all over the World I've seen so far - but suddenly emotions got the upper hand on rationality and I got immediately involved in that thing. I didn't realize what a thing I was about to do until the very first person, a girl, came towards me to get a free hug. I immediately felt tears streaming to my eyes and I had to swallow them back because I didn't want to get too emotional. To hug a person is a very simple thing to do - and yet is one of the most moving, happy things anybody could ever do. No need to hide behind any fake smile in a chat. You're living the moment, one hundred per cent. No way you can get distracted by something else in that very moment - no way you have the time to think how you should put it to get more appreciated by people. You are just...You. And people thank you for that. An elderly woman told me these exact words I'll never forget: "You're doing a great thing today. You're making people smiling". Another man told me: "Thank you. You're connecting the World". The World's not going so bad, though. Most of us may reckon we're getting more and more individualistic and selfish, sharing less and less with people in live interactions. And I might agree with that, but yet when you try to go out of the schemes there's still someone who follows and support you, and that's a good thing. It means people, of course, still feel the need of brotherhood and openness. Once you understand you can be different from what you usually think you are, things can change for better. Apparently effortless actions can get people to think a bit more deeply about connections. And if you believe in connections, you'll start seeing how many of them are just around you. No matter if you're too young or too old - it's never neither too early nor too late. Let Life surprise you. 

Free Hugs with Focallocal, Trafalgar Square.