It seems like I’m always meeting or seeing people who remind me of people I really know. I don’t know if I’m missing my friends or if I just subconsciously project my own ideas of friendship upon my surroundings. In a way it can be a little unnerving. The mannerisms and combinations of mannerisms that I find so charming in one person are apparently not as unique as I had once believed. Should I be happy that the qualities I enjoy are in fact prevalent, or disappointed that my idea of friendship is nothing new?
The interesting phenomenon is that I never really get to know the people who tend to remind me of others. Sometimes it’s simply because it’s not a convenient acquaintance: e.g. we meet in a chance encounter on a trip somewhere far from home. But could there be more to the story? Should I make a bigger effort to get to know these people, especially if they are people I end up liking? Perhaps I am simply satisfied with the qualities that attracted me to the new person in the first place as they are presented in my older friends. So, then, if I had met the new person first, and the old person last, would I have never become friends with my actual friend? It makes one realize how vulnerable we really are to the forces of chance.
In the few unusual cases where I have gotten to know the new person that reminds me of an old friend, I have found different qualities to mix in with the familiar, constructing a more complex image of the person. But that doesn’t mean that the familiar qualities cease to remind me of other people. Despite my efforts to distance this new person, to form them as a separate entity in my mind, there always seem to remain ties to the past. Which begs the question: hypothetically, could one meet so many people that they view each new acquaintance merely as a new combination of past friends? Does anyone possess characteristics and mannerisms specific only to them? Is anyone truly unique at all? (For more on this line of thought see “Musings on Acquaintances.”)
Perhaps the key is not what the quality or mannerism is, but how it is perceived. Everyone meets their friends and acquaintances in a different order after all, and the order is crucial to how the characteristic is perceived. To different people, a mannerism, such as the frequent rising of one eyebrow (a personal favorite), could feel different. Perhaps there are an even fewer number of truly original characteristics than we realize, and it is only how we recognize them that creates a greater variety. In that case, we have little to fear for originality. The possibilities for how someone would be viewed would depend in large part on the experience of the observer, and since every observer has a slightly different history of experience, the possibilities are nearly endless. Interestingly, such a theory could be flipped on its head to say that if two people have the right prior experiences, than they might perceive two other people completely different from one another as one and the same. Maybe this is over thinking the problem a bit. But if we can learn anything from nature, it is that important variation is oftentimes unimaginably subtle.
SCRIBERE 