Talking to strangers and moving past the election

It’s the final weekend before the presidential election and the last thing I want to do is write about politics. So, I won’t.

You will find politics on almost every other page of wherever you read this. Him vs her. Right vs left. You vs me. The country is ready to move on.

I think there should be more writing, and reading, that doesn’t focus on something vs something else. Writing about people who learn something they never knew of before because they had an encounter with a person they thought would be uncomfortable to encounter.

People who talk to everyone, familiar or not, are admirable. They believe everyone is worth something. Sharing a hello is ordinary. Wondering what you can learn from them is how you grow in life. They aren’t afraid of feeling uncomfortable, of sharing differences.

The greatest storytellers in the world get their stories from strangers. People they met on trains and buses. People they only knew for a short time but were long enough with them to remember.

I like the unordinary. Once a stranger sat down next to me at a park even though there were many empty benches around us. He didn’t think anything of it. To him, sitting next to someone makes that sitting time more worthwhile. It only took a few seconds for him to start about his day and his troubles.

Not big troubles, those little bumps in the road kind of troubles that you chuckle through as you talk about them. A lot of our life troubles are smaller than we imagine. They are pebbles that trip us not boulders that keep us from moving. We can’t see it at the time, until strangers point it out.

We Americans try to avoid being in what we think will be awkward situations. We want space. Life’s interruptions are too much a bother. Our relationships with our phones are not worth breaking. These characteristics are more American than anything else.

They say more people are moving out of cities and into rural areas. I live in a rural area and I’d like for it to stay that way. I like my space, too. That’s not to say that I don’t want new people around. In our rural communities, we do say hi to everyone. Maybe it’s because everyone you see looks like you’ve seen them before. You get the feeling you might already know them.

After the election, campaign signs will come down, there will be less divisive messaging (I hope). We’ll go back to driving down streets not knowing who’s voting for who and who’s not voting for who. We’ll just see each other as neighbors (I hope).

I also hope that we will meet each other in parks for the first time, and that we’ll talk with each other. That we’ll feel that maybe we did know each other and that even if we didn’t, that it was worth talking to each other like we did.

As time passes, I like to talk to people as if I had known them my whole life. When you know someone your whole life you can tell them anything, and life is so much easier when you can tell someone anything.

No matter who wins the election, the cure for many of our societal ills will be to talk to someone new for the first time.

It will be good for them and for you.