The Random Strangers Question

Last week in this space I asked you to try this, and send me your reflections:

Take note of at least three random strangers. Notice how you react to these people. Do you think, “We could be friends”? Do you feel a negative reaction, of fear, dislike, or something else? Do you find yourself looking down on them, or feeling like they might look down on you? (I’m not talking height, here.) Notice what is different about your reaction to these different persons, and ask yourself what’s behind that. You don’t have to interact with them; just pay attention to your reactions, and send me some reflection on what you notice when you ask yourself why.

As I wrote those words last week, I was sitting in a coffee shop and noticed a teenager at the counter, placing an order. I thought, there’s my first stranger. She had blonde hair and was wearing a short jacket, a very short, pleated skirt and nothing on her bare, pale legs that ended in a pair of sneakers. I glanced up at her a few times while she waited for her coffee. She looked like a perfectly respectable young woman but, in answer to the question I had just typed, I thought, “No, I don’t picture us being friends.”

I made myself examine that reaction, and I noticed how judgmental my reaction was. My first thought was one of criticism. “Seriously, bare legs? When it’s 35 degrees and snow is on the way? Be sensible, girl!” Who wants to befriend a frivolous person?

But it was more than that. That short skirt read “cheerleader” to me. I’m actually not sure it was that, but that was the category this girl landed in, for me. And it’s kind of a complicated category. I was the smart-but-not-popular girl who didn’t realize until the day of try-outs, in front of the very cute current cheerleaders, that I had zero chance of being picked to join their number. I was doomed to be, ever after, among those who stood in the stands, dependably following those girls’ cues, cheering on the home team in all our dutiful obscurity.

So when I was confronted with this girl who was maybe a cheerleader, I wasn’t exactly seeing her. My reaction had a whole lot more to do with my history, and my assumptions, and my experience of cheerleaders who, mostly, didn’t want much to do with me. It’s no wonder I so quickly thought, “Nope, not a potential friend.”

(I don’t love recounting this reaction, by the way.)

When I asked you for your reflections on reactions to random strangers, you sent me some interesting responses:

• Lisa says, “Yes, I could be friends” with her fellow mall-walkers. These are people who, like Lisa, are at the mall to get some walking exercise. She notes that they’re about her age (or a little older), of the same race and socioeconomic background. She describes the sense of camaraderie that develops among them, as they acknowledge one another with a smile or move aside for the person who’s walking faster. You can feel the ease and sense of familiarity in this experience.
• Sharon passed some homeless people camped under a tree on a bike trail in California. She didn’t say, but I sensed that she didn’t see them as potential friends. Instead she reported that her reaction was “to say a prayer for them. I didn’t feel threatened or better than them. I just felt I had had better advantages – the family I was born into, the opportunities I had growing up, things like that.” When you think about people with whom you’ve become friends, those aren’t usually our first reactions to them.
• Linda describes some interactions last weekend with three strangers who were part of a program she was helping to lead. My request encouraged her, she said, to enter into conversations with these three people, where she might have been inclined (as an introvert) to remain silent. This led to some great conversations and interesting connections that involved her hometown and some shared history, as well as a common purpose in being together. She says of one of them, “We will be lifelong sisters in Christ.”

Linda’s description of her active engagement in these interactions make me a little ashamed of my second story. I was finishing up my shower in the locker room after a good swim the other day. I could hear someone using the fixture on the wall next to the showers, spinning and drying her swimsuit, and I overheard her conversation with another woman about how she likes to spin it three or four times. (You only need to do it once, by the way.) I wrapped my towel around me, gathered up my toiletries, and headed that direction, hoping she’d finish up so I could put my dripping swimsuit in that contraption. As I came around the corner, she stood there, still running the spinner. She was a short woman, about my age, and she was stark naked. She looked my direction and she said, “Hi!”

You know how I described my “cheerleader” category a minute ago? What I discovered in this second interaction is that I don’t really have a category for “talking to a naked person.” (Truthfully, I don’t want one.) My response to “naked” in the locker room, which of course happens there, is to avert my eyes. It’s the opposite of what I do when I talk to someone. If I’m going to talk to you, I’m going to look at you, almost certainly. Those two forces–of not looking, and of looking–seem irreconcilable.

So, naked woman says “hi” and, well, I don’t! I do remember giving her a nod, or some other vaguely uninterested bit of body language, and I stood waiting in a slightly awkward silence while she spun her swimsuit a couple more times and then got out of my way so I could get on with my own afternoon.

And you hear it, right? the judgment in those words? She was not only naked. She was also in my way.

It’s no wonder I was never going to be friends with that woman.

I was heartened (though I’m not sure I should be) when Lisa told about her somewhat similar encounter with a very obese man in the waiting room for some blood work at the lab. “His bare stomach was drooping all the way down to his knees,” Lisa says. “His coat and sweatshirt were not long enough to cover it.” Lisa was “grossed out” by that sight, and by the man’s smell, “of stale smoke, and unwashed body and clothes.”

On reflection, though, Lisa reported being ashamed of the thoughts that went through her head, and of her unwillingness to make eye contact or any kind of conversation. “Why could I not be a bit more friendly?” Lisa asks. “I just wanted to pretend he was not there, and was glad when I could get out of the room.”

Huh, interesting. Lisa and I both got judgmental about that other person. In that state, it’s easy not to engage in the basic human interactions that both of us would say our values and our faith invite us to practice. Curious.

It also happens when we think we’re being judged. Sharelle describes her unease entering a bank branch where, once a month, she puts money in her granddaughter’s account to cover the cost of car insurance. It’s a simple interaction. The teller says, “May I help you?” And Sharelle explains why she’s there, gives her granddaughter’s name, and hands the teller a check and a piece of paper with an account number on it. But all this is laden with privilege and other-ness. Sharelle is a white woman in a setting where all the other people–like her granddaughter–are Hispanic. She imagines the teller reacting with a silent negative judgment on the monied, self-consciously munificent presence Sharelle feels she conveys in that place.

On reflection, Sharelle notices her discomfort may be misplaced. Maybe the judgment we’re feeling is our own issue. “Maybe the bank teller was thinking about what to make for dinner and if her kid would have a lot of homework,” Sharelle ruefully says. “I probably exaggerate my importance in the universe.”

My third random interaction came outside of the grocery store where I had dropped off some dry cleaning. I was walking out to my car when I passed a man of about 30 who was headed inside, with a confident, quick stride, a clean-cut look somewhere between “athlete” and “military,” and gleaming white Nikes.

Now, as a 50-something woman I have passed by a lot of men in my life. And it’s fair to say that I’m not the person on whom their gaze tends to linger. I’m well used to that roving male glance that moves on, having instantaneously made the calculation of “nothing to see here.” As I’ve grown older, I’m learning that age puts me at an extra remove from younger people in general, and men in particular. I’m at peace with all this, by the way. I understand it, partly because I know the ways my own attention has (or hasn’t) landed on men and women of various generations, across the decades of my life.

So, it is obvious to me that this man outside the grocery store will make the instant and infallible calculation that I am irrelevant to his life, and so I in turn make that same calculation with respect to him, so you can imagine my surprise when, as I walk past him, he says a completely unexpected, friendly “hello.”

Now, who knows what generated that greeting. Maybe this man has been taught to be kind to old ladies. (Ouch!) Maybe I reminded him of his mom. Maybe he’s an extraordinarily gregarious man who says “hi” to everyone! Or maybe he read my blog last week, so he was thinking about how he reacts to random strangers! I don’t read into his “hello” that he would answer my question, “Yes, I could be friends with that woman” (i.e., me). But still.

Did you notice that he was the one–not me!–who rendered my existence and our proximity not irrelevant, in that tiniest of ways?

I wonder how many times I have missed the opportunity to do that, for another human being. More on that, and how all this connects to Foolish Church, next week in this space.

It’s not too late to add your reflections on this subject, as we continue this conversation. Take a look again at last week’s post, or add your comments here, or send them in whatever way, about your random stranger encounters and about how you think all this connects to #FoolishChurch.

Image from Usability Geek.