You are riding the bus and looking at the people who come on board. You suddenly find you have the power to read the thoughts of others. Someone sits down across from you, you close your eyes and read their minds. What stories do you hear? What surprises do you uncover? What do you learn?
Riding a bus with closed eyes and reading people’s thoughts isn’t the best way to pass time but it’s amusing to know the views of unknown people. The lady sitting in front of me is thinking about whether or not she should steal her neighbor’s new sandals because she is jealous that she doesn’t have that much money to buy them but is not able to accept the fact that she is actually jealous. Then I see a young man sitting awkwardly in the front and comprehending if he shall follow the the rules of human ethics and give his seat to the old lady who just got in. He weights the pros and cons of the situation but at the end, the power of conscience takes him over him and he offers his seat to the old lady with a smile of inner realization that he has done something right in his absolutely disastrous life. But the old lady instead was not satisfied with the gesture as it took too long for the young man to offer her his seat but she accepted it anyways. Hypocrisy. That’s the perfect word for such situations. Even good things are hard to be appreciated these days. Sitting here and reading people’s thoughts has got me thinking that we don’t actually know what’s going on in their lives and we are easy to judge them, like the old lady who criticized the young man without knowing what was actually troubling him to give the seat away or he would have had a hard day at work. But that’s not how it works in life because it’s easy to judge. The one thing I learned from this experiment is that we are quick to judge and are at times not thoughtful.