Strangers

Sometimes my mouth can get me in trouble.

In particular, my need to talk to strangers.

I'm not sure where it comes from. It might be because living where I live and the life I've led makes it easy for people to treat me like I'm invisible, and I don't like that. So, I do the best I can to not let people I meet feel like they're invisible. I've had random conversations with thousands of convenience store clerks and shoe salesmen, among many others.

Starting a conversation doesn't always work. We won't go into what I thought was a pleasant comment to a young woman in the same security line as me at an airport. That went badly south, and I learned the valuable lesson not to make jokes at airport security.

But more often than not, I'm left feeling a tiny bit better about the world. For instance, I was paying my bill at a gas station and saw an unusual tattoo on the forearm of the young woman checking me out. I asked her about the ink and she said, “It's a lotus flower. I got it because while a lotus is a beautiful flower, it grows out of the worst kind of mud. I got it because I had a tough time growing up and it's a reminder to me that bad beginnings don't need to mean a bad ending.”

See what I mean? She seemed eager to tell the story, and I left the store feeling like a new man.

Another example that often pops into my head took place a couple years ago when my wife and I were in Ashville, North Carolina. We were having a great time walking around the city, exploring all the shops. Anytime I'm in a place with good art and great pastries, I'm calling it a win. We had just left a glass blowers shop and were headed for a place that was supposed to have the best chocolate croissants in the South, so I was in a very good mood.

My wife has a black puffer coat she wears whenever the weather is a tiny bit cool, and as we walked down a back street, we came upon three young Black men standing on the sidewalk planning their evening. When my wife walked past them, I noticed something and said, “Hey, Robin, you blend right in with these guys.” All four of them were wearing the same black puffer coat. Other than that, their appearance didn't have much in common, and it made me chuckle. The young men looked a little startled, and then they saw what I'd seen, and they laughed, too. We went about ten feet further and I heard a voice behind me say, “You folks have a good night.” I turned around and said, “Thanks, same to you.”

The young man nodded and said, “I appreciate that.”

Just a pleasant moment, a few seconds of human interaction. Didn't mean much, but I walked up the street feeling better about my life.

We live in a hard, often ugly world. There are so many forces trying to split us into smaller and smaller groups, pitting us against each other and trying to divide the world into winners and losers. We do have a lot of real differences, a lot of points of bitter disagreement, and that's not going to change.

But we also have a shared humanity we need to safeguard. We're fathers and sons, aunts and uncles, cancer survivors, stock car fanciers and so much more. We have so much in common; we all have so much to offer. It just needs to be discovered. The stranger sitting across the aisle on a bus or handing back your change might well hold a secret of the universe.

All you need to do is ask.

Copyright 2024 Brent Olson