Long-term relationships can be meaningful, grounding, supportive, and generally wonderful, but so much of life is made up of passing interactions. Why not make them as interesting as possible?
Sometimes I experiment.
Can I get this person to talk to me? Can I learn something surprising about them?
Half a lifetime ago, in Argentina, I cajoled responses out of locals by imitating complaints I’d heard about the humidity (it worked!) or by asking for help with a word or a phrase.
Locally, I approach it a bit differently. Sometimes, I share more details than absolutely necessary. Sometimes, I ask a question. Sometimes, I just try to keep an open face.
Here are some things I learned about people this past week:
- The health insurance rep who answered my call shares her belief in solving problems from the inside out (first, drink plenty of water), and how her current city sees itself as a city but isn’t really, certainly not relative to New York, which she left long ago.
- The guy bagging my groceries at Trader Joe’s says he loved age 7 best because that’s when he first got to choose a book to read for himself. Which book? The Prince. By Machiavelli. Which he didn’t understand but wanted to read because that’s what the big people were reading. (The big people in my life? Not reading Machiavelli.)
- At the park, a woman picked up an abandoned ringing phone, then allowed herself to be convinced to take responsibility for it and wait for the owner to return for it, even as the minutes ticked by and the owner called repeatedly to check in. Why not just leave it at a designated tree? Karma, she says. Despite having grown up well before the invention of even cordless phones, the prospect of losing her phone today is so horrifying as to be unimaginable. She isn’t qualified to carry her phone, she feels. It should be physically implanted in her somehow. She could definitely use the karma.
What’s been your most memorable interaction with a stranger? Did one of you ask the other a question? How did it feel to talk with someone new? Leave a comment and share below.
This Glass Has Water 