21 observations from people watching

Painting weddings for a few years now, I have spent a fair bit of time observing strangers move through a room. Seeing someone new, I always have a feeling of noticing their internal architecture. I did not realize that some people do not feel this way, at least not as intensely. 

1. By internal architecture, what I mean is, when someone talks to me, what I notice first are the supporting beams propping up their words: the cadence and tone and desire behind them. I hear if they are bored, fascinated, wanting validation or connection. I often feel like I can hear how much they like themselves.

2. I hear the speed at which they metabolize information and the nature of their attention. Attention falls on the spectrum of jumping bean to steady stream. Where it falls depends on a person’s nature, and also how much they want to be in that conversation. Someone’s quality of attention is evident from the questions they ask (how much they diverge from what the speaker is saying), if their gaze is wandering elsewhere, if they are fidgeting, restless. The outlier is dissociation, when someone is noticeably vacant, their attention completely absent.

3. Sometimes I see their feelings towards me when we talk, but that has the largest room for error in retrospect. Maybe the person I have the hardest time seeing clearly is still myself. I can see people more clearly when I am watching them talk to others.

4. I watch the person with the loudest laugh. The most striking thing isn't the volume—it's the feverish pitch. As the night goes on, it begins to sound more like desperation. Their joy has a fraying quality; it is exhausting to carry because it comes with a desire to seem happy and make others happy at all times.

5. When someone is flirting: Flirting is marketing, revealing yourself at a specific angle to coax a certain response. People have different marketing strategies, but this is always true: there is energy that is snaking outward, trying to find a surface to grip on. It can feel intrusive when un-welcomed, and pleasurably intimate if welcomed. Some people flirt with everyone. Some people only flirt with people they find hot. Some people never flirt.

6. It is easy to tell how happy someone is to see another person enter a conversation. There is happy, and there is polite, and they look very different. Polite has a mechanical quality to it, like carrying out all the right movements to replace batteries in a remote. Happy has a boundless quality: unpredictable, even when it is at a low level. There is an openness, allowing another person to surprise and delight them. The easiest way to say this: there is no script for happy. It tumbles out of the body. Polite comes from the mind –it is restrained and calculated – measured lines and pauses. There are reinforcing loops in a polite person and a happy person. A person closed to the possibility of delight finds less of it. A person open to it finds more.

7. When someone is close enough for me to hear them in conversation, I can hear how receptive they are to other people’s worlds. This is often encoded in the pace of their back and forth; the brief pause after someone says something, or the absence of any breathing room. The pause is usually sinking into a feeling, allowing themselves to process and respond in real time.

8. People who don't pause exist more in their head than their body. The mind is top-down, rigid, quick, enforcing an established view. The mind is waiting for the other person to be done so they can say what’s rattling around inside. The body is slower, needs more time, and then words bubble up organically, one after another, without planning. People who exist more in their body are generally better at connecting emotionally with others.

9. I can see how much someone accepts themselves by looking for intense distortions in the way they are interacting with the world. Find the range in how they treat people; if there is a split difference in their stance towards people they admire, and people they look down on. I never met a person who looked down on others and unconditionally accepted themselves. For people who are self-accepting, it is usually less the case that some people are treated like they are golden and others like they are cursed. They may still have preferences to engage with some people over others, but their baseline patience and goodwill does not fall and rise intensely.

10. There are people who hate the world, and people who love a very narrow understanding of it, and people who love the world unconditionally, in all lifetimes, in all understandings. People who love a narrow understanding of the world exhibit a settledness in their bones; they are satisfied and not reaching outward. But their dynamic range moving through a room, moving through conversations, is limited. Opposing ideas often cause them to disengage. It is a little sad to see this, all the possibilities they don't even know they are missing by keeping their world narrow.

11. It is easy to spot the person in the room who thinks they are better than everyone. It is the person uninterested in giving any of their attention, the genuine and open-ended kind, to anyone else. This is also painful to see, because they often cannot see their own misery, how unpleasant the world is if no one is good enough to be loved.

12. Some people don't like themselves. They hide this from themselves by thinking they don’t like other people. They often bristle like a porcupine any time someone gets too close. That, or the opposite: they need to be insulated by other people's skin at all times. These are contrasting expressions of the same fundamental fracture. A person cannot stand themselves, and as a result, they either can only stand being unperceived, or they need other people to constantly perceive them to feel okay.

13. Watching someone reach for shiny things — not necessarily the reaching, but the amount of hunger tangled with it— reveals how attached they are to their sense of desire and pleasure.

14. Look for unfounded apologies if you want to see how much someone believes in their right to exist. Look at the way they walk through a room, the way their shoulders are caved in or opened outward in relation to their ribcage, the way their eyes move to take in their surroundings, to see how much they believe in their belonging.

15. When I meet someone, I usually get a sense of whether they are generally happy, having a sad day, or generally sad, having a happy day. The emotional history of their life is often etched in the muscle tension in their face and their posture.

16. Some people are more like closed fists, others are more like open palms. Many of the driven people I have met are closed fists: warm, charming, and ready to punch through a wall at any point in time. There is a rigidity, a tunnel vision that naturally follows grasping for certain outcomes. An open palm has an expansive, receptive quality. They may still be incredibly intense and engaged with the world, but they are fluid, not forceful, in nature.

17. You can tell how controlling someone is by how forceful they are in conversation, how often they cut someone else off or steer the conversation towards what they want. Sometimes it is hard to see someone as controlling when what they desire is making you feel special and chosen.

18.  It is easy to see when someone has a widely felt gravitational pull. Just watch where eyes congregate and return in room.

19. I can see when two people are close in a way that blocks their energy from the rest of the world, insulated and intimate and barring others from entering. I can also see when two people are close in a way that supports each other in being more engaged with the world. I admire the couples who are able to inhabit both states: experiencing the kind of connection that doesn’t allow outside entry, and then turning outward and drawing people in together.

20. I can see how much trust exists between couples, based on how men and women interact with their preferred sex. It is easy to sense wariness, someone watching their partner's face as they talk to a beautiful stranger, tension carried in their forehead and jaw, scanning for threats. It is also easy to sense complete ease and safety. It is the orientation I mentioned earlier, being an open palm. Beautiful strangers are not treated differently from anyone else.

21. My favorite kind of person has an elasticity in their movements. There is an openness that does not need to be announced, a curiosity that looks like turning towards all experience. They are not the loudest, but because they exhibit an unconditional acceptance of everyone, they are usually well loved. It makes sense, doesn't it? Unless there are many layers of contortions, most people love what loves them back. Not desire, not need, love — to see them wholly, with gentleness and acceptance. If you are able to do that, most people will sense it. And they will try to love you back.