The Botanist
People are bizarre creatures, they are predictably irrational, emotionally driven and vastly different. An ex-botanist friend of my dad’s once said that explaining the development of an individual is fairly formulaic, one just needs to know where to look. He equated predicting the trajectory of individuals to a plant’s life, determined by 3 things: Genotype, phenotype and environment.
Basic Instinct
Strangely enough, primal components of the human condition have stayed largely intact: body language, tone of voice, scent and eye contact.
Paris People
Outside thought-provoking panels and captivating career conversations, my days in Paris were largely spent under variegated awnings, on some version of a reed-knit chair, around a little, round, metal-legged-table, facing crowded streets. Through my bubbly, bright, orange-tinted lens, I spent a lot of time observing the diverse population roaming the proud Parisian pavement. Parisian people-watching is exciting, you pretty much see everything, tourists, locals, fast-walking financial advisors and heretic-Haring types (and everything in between).
Uniformity
Eye contact with a stranger is an interesting experience. The state in which the individuals are in seamlessly guides the aura of this silent interaction. In the same way that a person laughing at a joke will evoke a sense of comfort and even attraction in a passerby, one that just received bad news (or having an intense conversation) will make them uneasy, resulting in an awkward shift of glance. It is a split-second decision, so complicated in nature, and in fact so misguided as, for the most part, the vibe received by an accidental eye contact is, for the most part, completely unrelated to the individuals involved. I have found myself in both types of silent interactions, the former leaving a bittersweetness of the road not taken, and the latter resulting in a snap outside my usual task-toolset.

This is very much universal, which tells me only one thing, at the core, we are all pretty much identical, with the more conscious traits creating an illusion of differentiation, distinction and uniqueness (linked to our self-image).
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