Stop and Make a Connection

Something we seem to do less and less is to stop what we're doing and make a connection with strangers around us. Taking the time to speak with someone, hear a little of their story, can affect both you and them.

I have no background medical or psychological fields, but I do know that making a connection with someone, however small, can lift a person's mood.

This past Saturday while out shopping, I was hurrying from store to store. Even with my trusty coupon book and shopping list I felt scattered and frustrated. Before shopping I had gotten the oil changed in my car. The $30.00 oil change became an $80.00 expense. While they were changing the oil and checking my car the technician found the start of a mouses nest. So, they had to clean it out and change my air filter, which they happily showed me. It was covered in mouse poo, sawdust, what appeared to be lint and a whole lot of dust. Needless to say, I was dismayed at the extra cost and disgusted that we were breathing in air that was being filtered thru that thing. It felt like just another thing going wrong and adding to the pile of things we had to pay to fix recently. 

After that sad bit of news, I went to a grocery store. I struck out at the clearance shelves and was headed toward the next sale item I needed to pick up. An older gentleman was passing by me and I smiled at him, he smiled back and said excuse me, thinking he had cut me off. I replied not to worry, I wasn't in a hurry and was enjoying having a few minutes to myself kid free. He chuckled and then he asked me how old, I told him my son was three months old and that kicked off a five minute conversation. It was a random conversation with a stranger about small trivial things, but left me feeling glad to have been there in that moment to speak with him. It turned out that this stranger had more in common with me than I could have imagined. He was a 75 year old physician that was going to be going to his college alumni get together in the next few weeks, it turns out that his college is 30 minutes from the town I grew up in. We chatted about places and things from that area and how much it had changed. 

I walked away from that conversation feeling happy and connected to a man I had never met before. Were my problems still there, of course, but after speaking with that gentleman they didn't seem so bad. Why, because I had stopped dwelling on them for a while and could look at them with a fresh perspective. And sometimes a fresh perspective or a new look is all you need to realize that things aren't so bad.