stranger love in a crowd

"Love one another" various religious leaders and figures have urged us, as if love was something you could will into being. "Practice loving-kindness," urge meditation teachers as they help us try to do so.

In a quieter, less densely-populated area such as the one I live in, it is easier to acknowledge each person you encounter than it is in a teeming city street or a big railway station. To respond, even to notice, each person would quickly exhaust you. We hurry along, regarding other people as at best irrelevant, at worst dawdling obstacles to get round between platform 12 and the entrance to the Northern Line so I can make my connection.

Every person on that station  concourse is a story, is in the middle of some narrative. I sat by a cafe window looking out and down at the crowd, taking the trouble to look at each face I could see, taking in the posture and attitude of each individual making up that transient pattern, that hurrying diverse crowd.

 I wasn't trying to feel any particular kindness towards any of them, but an unusual thing happened (unusual for me, though I guesss saintly people feel like this much of the time. I haven't filled in the application papers for sainthood, nor am I likely to. All that hard work and self-denial!)

I began to feel, unannounced, a kind of gentle benevolence, a sort of non-specific kindness towards them. 

Maybe I was doing what we do when we are looking for a specific face in the crowd, searching to pull familiarity and reassurance out of anonymity.

 This person's narrative

seemed to involve waiting for a train time on the indicator board - or was she looking for someone who was looking for her? which is perhaps why she stood still. 

Aha! One of the the faces in the crowd turned into the one she's looking for. (Actually, they hugged each other, but I didn't take a photo, it felt intrusive, somehow.)

And off they went; who knows how their stories changed after that meeting? 

I knew nothing of any of the people below me, through the window. I'd simply given them some time and attention, and a fellow-feeling, a kindness, had emerged. Of it's own accord, nothing to do with my ego or will.

"Love is most nearly itself when here and now cease to matter," wrote TS Eliot, and I had no idea what he meant. It had seemed to me that one loved someone, or a group of people, or a rugby team, a country, a few acres of ground. 

But if we see love as a universal force, an attraction, a state of nature, then perhaps that's the simplest and purest kind of love.

The people I was looking at had no idea about what I was feeling, of course. But it helped me; I was tired and feeling a little sad and drained when I sat down. I left the cafe feeling quite different.

And all I'd done was let something rise to the surface which is there in potential all the time.