MEETING STRANGERS

Meeting Strangers, Chicago, Paris

It’s been said that you can never cross the same river twice, for by then both you and the river have changed.  T. S. Eliot has written that “We die to each other daily. What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then. To pretend that they and we are the same is a useful and convenient social convention which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember that at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.”

I’ve met a legion of people in my lifetime as I’ve worked and traveled around this planet and as I think about it, I’ve only interfaced with only a small percentage for extended periods of time.  Certainly, the more time that passed between meetings of those people has been in direct proportion to how much we both have changed as the rivers of time have carried us along.  Thanks to modern technology like digital phones and communication apps, we can at least stay in touch which renders the parameter of distance less important.  But I’ve also been a proponent of MBWA or Managing By Wandering Around, i.e., having literal face time with others. 

The Eliot quote above triggered my thoughts about meeting people at different stages of my lifetime.  And I was deeply touched by a phone call I recently received from a dear childhood friend.  He confided that he was dying of a terminal cancer and wanted to call to let me know how much he had appreciated our friendship.  We split ways after high school, but stayed in touch occasionally over the years.  We still appreciated catching up on life even though there were large gaps in our lives.  But on reflection, that was enough.

And I’ve met most of the people in my circle of acquaintances in varying stages of our lives.  When I left home after college and moved to the city, most of the people I met later knew nothing of my early days through college.  But I met and enjoyed the company of many new friends in those subsequent days of permanent jobs, married life, parenting, golfing and travel.  Later in life we transferred to another state where another whole gathering of new friends developed who had no first hand understanding of my past, but accepted me as I was and I reciprocated.  I later traveled out of the country as a consultant where I again made new friends who had to judge me as I presented myself and I reciprocated.  All along the way we also established homes and made new friends as neighbors.  I still remember a business dinner meeting with strangers where a prospective customer confided that in the final analysis, we need to have trust in our partners.  They were apparently confident in their impressions and we got the contract.

Too many folks let their past define them while the changed present is all we really need to know about one another.  All of us wake up every morning as changed beings.  Some days it’s incremental and some days it’s profound.  Almost all reunions are among strangers that must reinvest time in getting reacquainted.  And although we can’t change the past, we can always learn from it, change for the better and create new beginnings.