The last few days have been very of-this-world. I’ve spent them establishing something like a life for my time here in Rio and running to appointments. It’s a new challenge – it being a foreign country and me not speaking the language and all – and it’s been fun, if trying at times. It’s also a complete reversal from my last few days in the States, as I wrote about here and here, in which I spent a great deal of time alone focusing on my internal world.
A huge part of this experience is trying to blend in; faking being a brazileira until I no longer have to fake it, I’ll just be one (though that would take a lot longer than the measly few weeks I’ve allotted to the cause). This includes always looking like I know where I’m going, moving with a purpose, and trying to adopt the same detached attitude all the locals seem to have to their surroundings.
This detached attitude is not unique to Rio – it’s a common factor you find in large cities the world over, in my experience. It’s a normal response to the stimulus overload you get in cities – the crush of people all around you, the noise, the smells, the activity, the signs, the traffic, the vendors and panhandlers trying to separate you from your money…The bigger the city, and the higher the population density, the greater the overwhelming sensory input from too many disparate sources and the more we feel the need to detach.
A detached attitude has its appeal. It says “I know this place so well, I don’t need to pay attention to what’s going on. I’m in control.” This unconscious thought is accompanied by at least the appearance of a distinct lack of worry – I don’t need to pay attention because nothing bad is going to happen. You see this everywhere in Rio, among all kinds of people – risky road crossings, crazy driving, and paying little attention to personal belongings. The detached attitude also bespeaks confidence, which humans value so highly in one another.
The nothing-bad-is-going-to-happen aspect of the Rio attitude appeals to me very much because people always tell you how you have to be careful in Rio, always watch your things, etc., and yet I haven’t seen anything to suggest I’m unsafe or felt I was being targeted for a crime. On the contrary, the people here all seem to be a combination of busy with their own lives and not even remotely interested in this estrangeiro with incomprehensible Portuguese and a look of total confusion on their face, and/or plainly honest without even the thought, let alone desire, that they might take advantage of you. Despite their seeming detached attitude, they do go out of their way to help strangers when they see the need. And I haven’t seen one crazy driver hit one crazy pedestrian yet, despite the ample opportunity for such unfortunate occurrences. There’s an empathy and even a tenderness for each other underlying the seeming detachment. The cariocas (natives of Rio) seem to draw their sense of no-worry not from confidence in their own separate goodness, rightness, strength or invincibility, as you see in so many American cities, but from a sense of connectedness – they trust that nothing is going to happen, but if it does, a carioca has hundreds of friends on hand to help them out. A detached attitude may not be unique to Rio, but this underlying sense of connectedness is. It’s this lack of connectedness in conjunction with our detached attitudes that makes others seem so cold and ourselves feel so alone in American cities.
Well, I kind of lost track of that connectedness. I got so consumed with all the things I felt I needed to do that I haven’t been making time to meditate or read – to just be. I haven’t been connecting with my inner self, and it was in this state of “sleep” that I went walking around Rio this afternoon trying to replicate the detached attitude of those around me. One of the ways that detachment manifests is in moving around with little apparent concern or regard for others. This includes the crazy driving, the crazy street crossings, and walking around briskly like you’re entitled to the space you’re in and the space you’re moving into regardless the people around you. So, that was me, walking around briskly with little regard for those around me and assuming nothing bad was going to happen.
At one extremely busy intersection in downtown, when the pedestrian light turned green, the crosswalk was full of stopped cars. The crush of people trying to cross the street – in both directions – was navigating the very narrow spaces between the cars. Trying to be a brasileira, I bounded into the craziness as well, taking care not to be careless about the other people, but asserting my right of way as I saw everyone else doing. Suddenly, I felt my shirt being pulled in the opposite direction. It had gotten caught on the backpack zipper of someone crossing the other way. We were both walking quickly, so my shirt was stretched pretty far by the time we both stopped just long enough to decouple ourselves. When I looked down to check out the damage, there was a dime-sized hole in my shirt.
Instant anger. It flared up before I even knew what was happening. Thoughts that ran through my head: “I only have two black tank tops, and now this one’s ruined.” “I really don’t want to have to spend the money I have on new clothes.” “This kind of thing isn’t supposed to happen!” And there was no one to blame. It wasn’t her fault. She was just crossing the street like everyone else; she didn’t mean to catch my shirt on her backpack. At most, I could say she was being careless. But, if she was being careless, then so was I.
I guess that was when I realized I’d been walking around in a bit of a mindless trance. I’d gotten so absorbed in the external world and trying to fake being a brasileira that I lost touch with my inner Being.
The little things really do matter, and the devil really is in the details. Simply staying connected to myself might have prevented the collision in the first place (I didn’t really want to enter that mess, I only did it because everyone else was doing it and when in Rome and all that) or at least helped me to observe my anger as it rose instead of allowing it to take me over, however briefly.
With the benefit of reflection, I can be grateful for the relatively gentle reminder that it’s what’s inside – truly little things – that matters, not the external world of fear and loss.
TL;DR: Lost myself in the external world of illusion, got a gentle nudge from the universe to snap out of it.
