I've been doing the majority of our grocery shopping for almost 8 years now. For a long time the most overwhelming thing about handling the shopping was the all the other people I had to share space with. This might be a side-effect of being homeschooled - my method of interacting with people is to actually interact with them, and it seems like one thing school teaches people is how to become part of a crowd while being in their own little world. When I go to the store, I see several hundred people, most of whom don't notice I exist unless I directly run into them or intrude into their world in some unavoidable way.
The amazing thing is that after having spent 8 years observing people at the same grocery stores week after week, I have come up with an odd theory that there are really only a few different kinds of people in the world. Hundreds of people, and yet I have this feeling I'm interacting with hundreds of clones of just a few different personalities.
I'm not the first person to have this theory. Agatha Christie's Miss Marple has a favorite philosophy that people are the same everywhere, so if she sees someone who looks like little Simon Smith down the street, she remembers everything that happened with little Simon and applies it to the fellow she just met with surprisingly good results.
If you want to go deeper, Solomon had the same philosophy. He pointed out in Ecclesiastes that he finally came to the conclusion there is nothing new under the sun. Everything that's being done has been done before and will be done again.
People like to think they're unique and special, but the truth is that people are very predictable and similar. Even our DNA, which should be pretty unique and definitive, usually does match that of at least one other person in the world. Sure, it's two out of every trillion or some small percentage, but the point is that people ARE copies of each other.
In some ways that's a little disturbing. In other ways, it's encouraging. A wise person can look at how everyone else in the world acts - especially people who are similar to themselves - and tell how he or she is going to act under the same circumstances. With one very important difference: a wise and observant person can also understand how to deny their natural reflexes and act the way they want to rather than the way they're programmed to.
Take old people, for example. A lot of people spend their whole lives resisting the idea they're getting old only to turn into exactly the same kind of old person they despised. Most of us have a horror of looking ridiculous and the terrible thing that happens to us when we get old is we tend to look and act like fools. We don't drive right. We tie up lines at the store. We forget we've told the same story four times straight to the same person. We lose our fashion sense and dress in oddball styles and colors; and worst of all, we seem to have absolutely no relevance to our descendants' day-to-day lives. This is how an elderly human being behaves. However...every now and then you come across an old person who seems to have defied the laws of physics and gotten old without getting foolish. They might not hear or see like they used to, but they've refused to become stupid and irrelevant. They couldn't help getting old physically, but they sure did something about the personality problems.
I want to be an old person. I want to live to 100, and I want to be the kind of old woman who has experience and wisdom instead of just age and foolishness. Now, I know from looking at the women I'm copied from that certain things I do are already leading me toward old age and foolishness. I would be stupid to think that just because I'm 25 and not really displaying an old lady's tendency's, that'll continue when I'm 70. However, I know that because I'm not unique, I can predict and manage the behavior that could turn me into a silly old lady. I do not HAVE to turn into a silly old lady.
All I have to do is recognize I'm not unique and act accordingly.
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