A Small Pleasure

“Close! Stand Close to me, Starbuck; let me look into a human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than a gaze upon God. By the green land; by the bright hearthstone! this is the magic glass, man; I see my wife and my child in thine eye¹”

A month ago, I ran into a stranger in my building elevator. We got into small talk about the looming lockdown that was about to go down in the city where we live. She seemed happy about the imminent reality: “I hate other people anyway”, she assertively confessed. I haven’t seen her since that day, but her words stuck with me.

The Lady from Upstairs crosses my mind from time to time, and I wonder if she still “hates other people”, a month into isolation.

Today, there seems to be a void in my existence — it is not loneliness and it is not boredom. There is a thirst that is unquenched by those in your immediate circle. Material seem to be recycled, used and reused as you shuffle through the current available “safe” options for social interaction. None are quite so satisfying: there are no breakthroughs and all is predictable. Patterns repeat themselves, topics become mundane, leaving you feeling even more isolated in monotone. Perhaps this is what the Lady from Upstairs meant: maybe she “hates” those that are already familiar.

Perhaps The Lady from Upstairs has altogether given up on the magic that transcends in the uniquities of strangers. It is possible that she’s innocently forgotten her own beloved as once strangers, prior to her granting them status of “close”, “dear”, “safe”. I don’t blame her, it is easy to be worn out by those you know: we hate to admit that interacting with the familiar is admittedly lackluster.

Not that close confidents don’t serve a vital purpose in our lives, especially during a crises when everything doesn’t seem to hold up anymore. These familiar people are our anchors — they are everything we got. The blessed souls we know keep us grounded, sane, relevant. That being said, we seem to still long for strangers. Why is that?

When We Were Strangers, I Watched You From Afar

“There’s the idea of bumping into experience and people while you’re wandering. you really are experiencing life that way. Nothing is routine, nothing is taken for granted. Everything is standing out on it’s own, because everything is a possibility, everything is a clue, everything is talking to you. It’s marvelous. It’s as though you had a nose that brought you into the right places.” ²

Every time you bump into a stranger, you stand a chance at encountering one of life’s small pleasures. Life is full of heroes, guides, and villains. This is just the way it goes in our personal hero journey. It is the stuff that makes life juicy: a chance rendezvous with a soul that stands to leave a mark in your life, and you on theirs. It is the making of symbiosis itself; after all, not only is the man standing next to you a stranger, but you are a stranger to him as well. The danger suddenly subsides when you realize that this is how people see you the first time they bump into you — just as you see them, a mere stranger. Now you can feel the beautiful equality in encountering strangers: there is a sense of natural justice you just can’t extract from people you already know.

We may at times strike strangers with our quirky thoughts and sometimes we are stricken by their apparent judgements. Whatever the case may be, it is all an intricate web of life’s inner workings. We are only relevant when placed in contextual relation to the other. It is not that we cannot live in isolation, but that we’d rather not; For the single reason that we need to be remembered by others for the things that we do and the personas we keep. Isolation disrupts our heroic effort to write our next chapter that naturally gives birth to mysterious characters we are yet to meet, talk to, befriend, love, or hate. In isolation, our hero journey is put at a standstill, it is reduced to a script unfinished, a film paused, a song muted: No longer can we recognize ourselves in the other and for the other to recognize themselves in us. The minute we cease to interact with strangers is the minute we begin to lose ourselves. It is decay by distance, not by disease.

Out of sight, out of mind

The heart still yearns for a glance, a word of appreciation, a smile, or even a quit thought from a stranger. With them they bring alien experiences that render us immortal. Don’t we intend on leaving a legacy that is remembered by “others”? Wouldn’t you say that a faction of those “others” are complete strangers: customers we served passionately, cab drivers we confessed to helplessly, servers we bowed to gratefully? It so stands that we are nothing but atoms, suspended in a serendipitous solution, colliding with one another, in wondrous coexistence.
Not all were memorable collisions perhaps, but you surely will remember the smile your soon-to-be wife gave you the first time she laid eyes on you in a nearby cafe (true story), or the awkward small talk you had with your soon-to-be best friend in the building elevator (true story), or the first meeting you held with a customer-soon-to-be business partner in a hotel lobby (again, true story).

All soon-to-be serendipity begins with two strangers uniting by some predestined cosmic fate. The possibility of such happening gives us a small pleasurable sensation of divine chance: permutations of kindness and likability, empathy and tolerance, wisdom and heroism, destiny and immortality.

…Till we meet again, Stranger.

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This post was previously published on Change Becomes You and is republished here with permission from the author.
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