The Curious Trait of Strangers

I had to take care of some business today. I went to the first college I attended and every brick and stone seemed to suck my soul from me. It was a place where I felt the coldness and emptiness all around me. That is, until I started talking to secretaries and professors. I asked them where to go for the various papers I needed, and what to do when I got them; then I started telling them about myself and asking about their lives. Why is it we are so free with strangers? We tell people much different things when we never expect to see them again. We tell a story, a problem, a memory; and I do believe we think they will carry it away with them and we shall never see it again.

Why is it we are not so honest around our own loved ones, I asked myself? Why do humans so easily become friendly? Indeed we put trust in these people. We encourage them, sometimes more than our closest loved ones. As I listened to one professor tell me that life would be okay and I would figure things out, he paused for a second and said, "Maybe I should be more encouraging to my son." We need quick friends and strangers in our lives. Our corporate world tells us to let no one close, but to address all customers as if they were the best of friends. We know this to be incorrect from Aristotle, who talks about the basic friendships. The friendships of utility he called them. These are the relationships of people that just allow us to get by in life.

Indeed we love strangers so much simply because they are blank canvases with which our imaginations can paint their souls. Most of us have thought of some striking beauty who crossed our paths, and imagined life with that person. We made up an history and story of how we met. Perhaps we have seen a famous leader and imagined how he or she acts around friends and loved ones. The rubber hits the road when we must wake ourselves from who we wish that person to be and accept that person as who he or she is. The beauty may not find Blur to be a good band. The politician may not agree on our favorite pet issue. We grow as people when we love these people in spite of who we wish they would be.

And I guess that is true with all our relationships. Our parents, children, siblings, spouses, best friends, and co-workers are not perfect. They don't all like Blur and they don't all agree with us on the pressing issues of politics, but somewhere in that soul, they are made in the image of God. It takes real humility to submit our opinions to this reality. Maybe every time we imagine someone as we would want them to be, we seem to tell God that he made a mistake and would be better off following our blueprint.

Still, there is a joy in the reckless abandon of projecting histories and stories to go along with a fellow human being and so long as it doesn't hurt the real person, there isn't much harm. So it seems that our relations should be somewhere in between our imagination of the best for a person and our acceptance of God's gift of free will. Where one begins and another ends I don't know, but it is nice to have a break from the realities of life with a group of strangers.