Choosing Your Crowd
One of the penalties of over-population is that most of us who aren’t complete shut-ins have had to evolve and adapt certain social mechanisms to manage the crowds. There are simply too many people in our every day lives for us to have a personal relationship -- by any stretch of the definition -- with each of them. No one is going to say hello to everyone they encounter in the aisles of their supermarket. Maybe in the old days, in less urban areas, where the social geography was small enough that you might know — at least on a nodding basis — everyone you might see on any given day, but not today.
It seems perfectly reasonable to have a strategy. I mean, you’d never get the shopping done if you stopped to talk with everyone in the store. Beyond the busyness of it, you would be spending too much time in that portion of your brain that deals with basic social functioning; and less time in the area of creative thinking.
To preserve that special private time in the mind -- that place where we do our best thinking -- we control the amount of inputs in our daily lives through a form of subconscious triage. We (1) engage the people who are important to us, (2) give tentative ear to those who might have something worth hearing, and (3) ignore those we don’t know and don’t need to.
In large measure, those new people who come into our purview are assessed not only by what importance they (might) hold for us, but also by whether or not they are the sort of person we would want to have in our circle. And which circle we were considering, for example, personal relationships with family and close friends, business associates, bowling buddies, etc.
How do new people make the cut? Primarily we make our selections and rejections based on visual cues. Smell matters a lot, too; indeed, our olfactory sense has the keenest memory. Touch matters as well, for instance, in how a new person shakes hands. And the sound of a person’s voice can make a difference; if you’re selecting a receptionist, for example, you usually try to find someone with a pleasant and encouraging voice.
Regrettably, we have too long been inculcated with a predilection to rely on our physical senses. The fact is that if we used our intuition, we would make better choices on who should be in our circles or not and every time. Intuition, the sixth sense, is an energy field that sparks awareness in advance of deliberate attention. Intuition is pure, fact-based. Unfortunately, intuition can be, and often is, deliberately mis-interpreted by wishful thinking or fearfulness.
Is intuition — the non-sense — capable of performing triage for us? Could we trust it to select best for us? Probably, and it would be worth a try. But consider that if we are to turn over our selection process to our intuitive, it might mean finally jettisoning those in our circles who have been more habits than true companions. Not out of spite or in a fit of cleanse-liness, but to create room on our plate for new people more suited to the new me. Truth be told, some culling is always good when we get too comfortable.
And that’s SetonnoteS...I’m Tony Seton.