I am surprised at how oblivious many people are going about their daily tasks. When I visit the supermarket or shop in any store I expect to find people blocking half the aisle with their cart and the other with their body. I see them, lost in thought, probably confused about the items they should purchase, and completely unaware that there might be other shoppers who need to move past them.
Positional awareness is a critical modern survival skill. The polite, aware individual knows how much space they take up, watch for others, and never let themselves block progress and traffic flow. When blocking is unavoidable, acknowledge others, indicate that you are trying to move, then as quickly as possible, get out of the way.
Perhaps what bothers me most about this is the obliviousness, the lack of recognition and acknowledgement of others. I see drivers speed through intersections intentionally ignoring pedestrians. I see people in stores lost in their own world and happy about it.
This modern world would be a much better place and easier to navigate if we each took responsibility for our positions and made it clear that we were both aware of others and awake to their reasonable movements and needs. Ignoring my existence is infuriating and unnecessary. Share the space, don’t block it.
Is that too much to ask?
The Modern Manners: Shopping Cart Positional Awareness by Randy Murray, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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