I was on a bus in Brooklyn a couple of weeks ago.

My eyes strayed to a seat across from me, and I saw that a young woman was smiling at me.

Beaming.

She had a five or six or year old boy in her lap. It was a bit different than holding a toddler in one’s lap. The boy was restless. But the mother and her son and seemed to be totally in sync.

“Is he going to school. Or he is too young for that?” I asked.

“No, he’s going to school,” she said, still smiling.

Then, I got off the bus. She waved at me and wished me a good day. It was as if we had been glad to meet.

This little encounter — unanticipated, most would say totally inconsequential — set me up for the rest of the day. It was as if somehow I had made her morning pleasurable. She certainly did that for me.

A reason I am writing about this is because this sort of thing happens to me very often in New York. I doubt such encounters would be as likely in the suburbs. (Certainly not if one were driving to work or an appointment.) Rubbing shoulders with others as a matter of course is something I love about living in NYC.

When I first moved to New York as a young man, everyone seemed to in a hurry, and the City seemed cold and impersonal.

It’s exactly the opposite. Many New Yorkers have told me that their experience has been the same.

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In his poem “Mannahatta,” Walt Whitman said something very similar:

Rich, hemm’d thick all around with sailships and
steamships, an island sixteen miles long, solid-founded,
Numberless crowded streets, high growths of iron, slender,
strong, light, splendidly uprising toward clear skies, …
The mechanics of the city, the masters, well-form’d,
beautiful-faced, looking you straight in the eyes,
Trottoirs throng’d, vehicles, Broadway, the women, the
shops and shows,
A million people–manners free and superb–open voices–
hospitality–the most courageous and friendly young
men,

— Roger W. Smith

   December 2018

 

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When faith finally tiptoed into my life it didn’t come through information or persuasion but, at least at first, through numinous experiences. These are the scattered moments of awe and wonder that wash over most of us unexpectedly from time to time. …

In 2013, I experienced an acceleration of those moments. This time they were not mere spooky experiences but illuminations — events that tell us about the meaning of life and change the way we see the world. One morning in April, I was in a crowded subway car underneath 33rd Street and Eighth Avenue in New York (truly one of the ugliest spots on this good green earth). I looked around the car, and I had this shimmering awareness that all the people in it had souls. Each of them had some piece of themselves that had no size, color, weight or shape but that gave them infinite value. The souls around me that day seemed not inert but yearning — some soaring, some suffering or sleeping; some were downtrodden and crying

— David Brooks, The New York Times, December 19, 2024

 

additional comments of my own:

I was on the Q58 bus going home a couple of months ago. My eyes usually roam to momentarily scan the passengers. There were two young Asian women seated a couple of seats behind me. I didn’t take notice of them, but they got up to leave before my stop and as they passed me one of the women, young and attractive, smiled at me. It was such a warm, genuine, wholesome smile; it came unexpectedly and infused me with a warm feeling.

— Roger W. Smith, December 2024