A place where everybody does it

Some rooms are simply saturated. A country where it is at every table, a festival, a building site, a family house where it is what people do after the meal and always has been. You walk in and it is not one person offering you something, it is the ambient temperature. Nobody here is going to help you. There is no clean corner to stand in and no ally to catch eyes with across the room, and you have a week of this, or a month, or a job, and you are tired already just thinking about it.

So use the easiest identity available to anyone. Be the visitor. Nobody expects a stranger's habits to match the room's. A person from somewhere else is allowed to eat differently, sleep differently, leave earlier, want a walk at an odd hour, and the room absorbs every bit of it without a second glance, because that is what visitors are for. You do not need a position on anything. You do not need a reason or a stand. You only need to be from somewhere else, which, in the sense that counts here, you now are.

That is more than a trick and it is worth sitting with. A norm has no authority over you. It only has gravity. It feels like a rule because everyone is doing it at once, but nobody in that room has decided a single thing about you, and most of them will never notice what is or is not in your hand. Almost all the pressure you can feel is being generated on your side, by imagining an attention that nobody is actually paying. The room is not watching you. The room is busy.

So go, and stay ordinary in it. Keep a glass in your hand, volunteer for the outside errands, be the one who walks to the shop for bread. If someone offers you a cigarette, it is no thanks and a question back, and it is finished in a second. You are not enduring this place. You are simply in it, differently. God is not only in the easy rooms, and a self that cannot exist in a hard one was never really a self. Walk in as the visitor. Walk out as yourself.