Delighting in Seeking Interactions with Strangers and the Loneliness of Just Keeping Your Head Down
We can keep our heads down and ignore strangers entirely, or try to except when forced, or we can choose to raise our heads, put a smile on our faces, and occasionally say hi to strangers. There are pros and cons, but bear with me — I argue that it’s worth the discomfort you may find in meeting strangers’ eyes and positively pursuing that interaction.
First, what happens when you keep your head down, only engaging with forced?
By looking at the sidewalk, the times you engage with strangers are likely to be negative. Someone yells at you in traffic, bumps into you on a busy sidewalk, or makes a snide comment. These are strangers behaving as though they are invisible and will have no punishment for their actions. There are few strangers who are so cheerful that they will force you to meet their eyes when yours are so focused on not meeting anyone’s. Your chances of a negative interaction with strangers are likely to be higher, in greater density, because you are excluding positive interactions but cannot avoid these negative interactions that you will encounter regardless of whether you welcome them or not. By looking down, you are choosing primarily to exclude the positive, not reducing the negative in a significant way.
When I was growing up, I watched my mother cling to bitterness like a blanket, but it didn’t make her happy. She distrusted strangers but wanted to be seen as wonderful, of high class, respected, etc. She chose not to engage with people for reasons of racism, classism, bigotry. Meeting strangers’ eyes was not exactly something she did. Hatred of “otherness” was more her style, and it’s a lifestyle I choose to reject. Not all people who keep their head down have hard hearts, but they seem closed off, even unintentionally, of engaging with the wonder that is in this world and, yes, strangers.
What happens when you raise your head and choose to positively engage?
You cannot avoid interacting to some degree with someone who cuts you off in traffic, but you can choose whether you yell at him, cut him off later on, or just let it be, laugh at the smallness of his actions.
You cannot help having strangers bump into you sometimes on a crowded subway, but you can meet the eyes of a stranger and smile, laughing together at the tourists who seem surprised by the huddled quarters.
By looking around, watching for those opportunities to engage even for a split second with another human being, you make it more likely to have more positive chance encounters than if you had just looked down.
Not everyone will want to meet your eyes. The woman may not hear you if you compliment the funny saying on her shirt.
But, sometimes positively reaching out plants seeds of joy. The dog owner walking by may let your child pet her dog for a moment, creating a positive engagement for four living beings in those ten seconds. Someone whose eyes you met in the parking lot may hold the door open for you so you can run into the building more quickly as the downpour soaks everything around. The pedestrians you stopped for at the crosswalk and waved to may be going to the same restaurant you are and start a conversation that leads to a better evening than you’d imagined. True stories.
Negin Farsad discusses on an episode of The Nerdette how she practices “being aggressively delightful”. It’s a lovely interview that’s worth listening to in its entirety. Instead of just responding with anger when people come at her in aggressive or ignorant ways, Farsad tries to respond with positivity that allows for a human engagement and understanding. I loved listening to her reveal an encounter in which a very conservative man started a conversation with her, a Muslim woman, in a way that could easily have just been an infuriating comment that made her roll her eyes and walk away. Instead, she engaged him with kindness to the point that they both would have met again for coffee because they formed that human connection through the ensuing conversation. How delightful.
There is something worthy of value within each of us, and that’s one of the aspects of Unitarian Universalism that I hold dear. By looking up when I go into the world, I open myself to discover the wonder around me. Not all encounters are lovely divine things, but there are so many wonderful experiences that I have had with strangers because I stepped out a bit, smiled, and met eyes, that I have found it worth continuing to do.
I choose to engage in these ways with strangers for myself, and I also do it for my daughter, to have her see that people can be good, even if we do stupid things sometimes, that we have good within us, and that the world isn’t always such a crazy, scary place.
Opening yourself up to these interactions can help you engage more meaningfully, intentionally, and positively with the world and others as well. Try it. Maybe just for a couple weeks. Let me know your experiences.
