Now…Where Should I Sit?

Everyday Choices

It’s 6pm on a cloudy day in Dusseldorf, Germany. After a long day of crossing cobblestones, pavement, and parks on gifted, plastic flip flops, I get to Aldstadt, the old city on the rivershore, and the only thing left to do is pick a bench. I had three views to choose from. The first is a great view of a flock of sheep grazing on the opposite end of the muddy, evergreen sandbanks, like dots of cream that barely stir. The other is a front-row seat of the Theodor Heuss bridge, that sits like two stick figures sitting with their backs pressed against each other, long steel cobwebs hanging from forehead to lap. It’d be precarious if it wasn’t made by Germans. From the last pick of the views, I’d catch the glare of the sun behind the dulcet clouds mushroomed over the entire horizon long expanse of the Rhine. I choose the closest one.

On the bench next to me sits This Guy, a shrunken (possible) computer programmer, pointing his creased forehead directly at the ground, drinking a beer and smoking what smells like a bidi*, as punks on skateboards rattle past on the waffled concrete. There’s something so perfectly depressing about drinking alone, in sunlight, at a park. He’s like the real life version of Dilbert once he steps out of his comic box cubicle, into the margins. He doesn’t get more than halfway through his cigar before throwing the rest onto the pathway in front of him, watching the last puff settle on his lap, then reaching into his pocket for another.

*Bidis are Indian rolled leaf cigarettes I ran out of two weeks ago. Now I know it takes about two weeks for the body to register nicotine addiction and now I smell it everywhere.

“Hey, are those bidis?” I yell.

“No, they’re cigars.”

“Oh, they smell exactly like bidis, they’re these Indian rolled leaf ciga-”

“Well, they’re cigars.”

He waits a couple seconds before pushing the attitude reset button.

“You want to..try..one?”

I sit down and start smelling his box of cigars when he notices my notebook.

“What are you doing?” already craning his neck forward to steal a peak.

I had been drawing a chart of priorities I wanted to focus on during the next couple months: networks I would want to build, people I’d like to meet, and skills I’d like to build/grow. Not that I even know which skills, but I just enjoyed the redundancy of writing ‘build skills’ on a chart with no specifics.

“Oh you’re trying to make logic out of it. That’s not possible.”

At 32, This Guy claims we don’t make choices. We wake up, we eat, we go to work, we take what comes our way, and choosing from what’s in front of us doesn’t necessarily make it a choice. He studied sociology because he loves studying groups of people. Then the tech wave blew in and he looked at his skills, looked at his interest, found something that aligned, and here he is. Plus, it pays well. But his interests come from what he was exposed to as a kid. His exposure was limited to his family and what they could afford, so his limit in choices was set before he was even born.

He looks down, ruffles through his backpack, and offers me a bottle of apple cider from the freshly bought six pack nestled between loose bottles of beer.

“I want to get drunk today.”

“Why?”

A year ago today, give or take a day, he lost his best friend. To jealousy.

“Once I got this job, he stopped talking to me cause he’s jealous of my position.”

They had been friends since childhood, went on holidays together, have known each other their whole lives. And for each phase of their intertwined lives, his friend had always ‘done better’. His friend always had the better job, always gave the advice, and This Guy thinks that when he got his new job as a project manager at a travel website, the power dynamic shifted and it was a blow to his ego. For years, he had stacked his sense of self worth on the idea of being better than someone, that when his arm chair of a best friend exceeded standards, his ego couldn’t handle it.

I go through the standard “Why don’t you….” solution bouquet before offering my own loss of a great friendship.

“I was going through a hard time and I leaned on this friend too much. So I think she dropped me because I was too much of a burden…Do I sound naive?”

“Sounds like you’re just reasoning, making excuses.”

That’s exactly what he was doing too.

“I think whatever happened, we aren’t them and there’s no way to really know why. Not knowing hurts even more so we attach ourselves to whatever hypothesis hits hardest, then accept whatever evidence confirms it. Either it’s okay to have an excuse, or it’s okay to not know.”

It’s funny what happens when you’re picking a bench to sit on. I realized, the only time I recognize my own broken logic is when I hear it coming out of the mouth directly opposite mine. Sometimes, if I make the choice to open up, tell strangers my dark secrets, my insecurities, everything, maybe they share something that makes a mark on me, or vice versa, and I learn something, whether I mean to or not. The small choices we make every single day add up.

“Well, I’m gonna head home now, it’s getting dark. It was nice talking to you. Do you always get this deep with strangers?” I ask.

“Only strangers,” he laughs, “I hope I never see you again.”