Talking to Strangers
4/12/06
In the grocery store today, I spied a young woman on roller skates, pushng her stroller. It reminded me of my teen years, when roller skating was the rage and I had personalized a pair of old white leather ones with magic markers, skated everywhere and drove my mother nuts. So I told the woman how cute she looked, we got to talking, turns out she's from Switzerland and even though I'm probably twice her age, I felt a connection based on the shared inclination to do something unusual just because it feels good. We should all skate through life if we so choose.
We should also talk to at least one stranger a day. It's amazing how many humans we come into contact with, yet pass by without so much as a nod or aknowledgement. All the more easy to do in LA where we're all in our cars, but still we do get out every now and then. I loved that energy in New York, which I miss here. Of course, one can't greet every one of the hundreds one meets in teh course of navigating her streets, but one does draw a kind of psychic web throughout a day of crossing streets, taking the subway, riding an elevator, sharing a store aisle with other city dwellers.
I wonder what it would be like if people skated, skootered, boarded, bicycled, skipped and danced through their days, instead of plodding along as we tend to do? Wouldn't we be more likely to enter inter-act as we pay more attention to how we navigate on these varied modes of transportation? When we're all on auto-pilot, we miss so much, so many signs of life. And we're all craving those connections, no matter who or where we are.
Talk to a stranger; strap on your skates; reach out and catch teh wind in your sails.
In the grocery store today, I spied a young woman on roller skates, pushng her stroller. It reminded me of my teen years, when roller skating was the rage and I had personalized a pair of old white leather ones with magic markers, skated everywhere and drove my mother nuts. So I told the woman how cute she looked, we got to talking, turns out she's from Switzerland and even though I'm probably twice her age, I felt a connection based on the shared inclination to do something unusual just because it feels good. We should all skate through life if we so choose.
We should also talk to at least one stranger a day. It's amazing how many humans we come into contact with, yet pass by without so much as a nod or aknowledgement. All the more easy to do in LA where we're all in our cars, but still we do get out every now and then. I loved that energy in New York, which I miss here. Of course, one can't greet every one of the hundreds one meets in teh course of navigating her streets, but one does draw a kind of psychic web throughout a day of crossing streets, taking the subway, riding an elevator, sharing a store aisle with other city dwellers.
I wonder what it would be like if people skated, skootered, boarded, bicycled, skipped and danced through their days, instead of plodding along as we tend to do? Wouldn't we be more likely to enter inter-act as we pay more attention to how we navigate on these varied modes of transportation? When we're all on auto-pilot, we miss so much, so many signs of life. And we're all craving those connections, no matter who or where we are.
Talk to a stranger; strap on your skates; reach out and catch teh wind in your sails.
posted by Barbery at 6:16 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home