Human Racing

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it! - Charles Dickens, in A Tale of Two Cities

I absolutely love this quote, not to mention this novel. I often think about how strange it is that there are SO many people in the world, so many that my mind can't even fathom the sheer numbers of them, and I will only know a tiny, tiny fraction of them.

I love people. I love our strange idiosyncrasies, our weird habits, our individual reactions to joy or disaster, and how everyone is vastly different from everyone else. Two people can look alike, even be identical, but their insides are still as different as night and day. Of course, everyone has similarities; there are just too many people for that not be. But I just think it is fascinating that there are millions and millions and MILLIONS of individual human beings living their lives on this earth. Everyone has their own beating heart, inflating lungs, blinking eyes, favorite breakfast food, private fears, sentimental memories, and preferred way of eating a taco, to name a few. Every person on this earth is worthwhile, and I agree with what Andy Warhol said: "I think everybody should like everybody".

One of the reasons I love being in cities so much is I love seeing the pure variety of people. Sometimes the place I live seems more like a loaf of Wonderbread than the "Great melting pot" America has been labeled as, so I love traveling and seeing cities for the new perspective it offers. Some people are short-tempered, some are spectacularly attractive, some are good with babies, some are shopaholics, some are great cooks, some lack any modicum of patience, and some are all of these things. But we are all people. We all came from the union of sperm and ovary. We all were born, and we will all die. We're all different, but we're also all the same. Like Depeche Mode said, "People are people." And I think that's beautiful.