You Just Never Know…

…unless you take the risk  ---- even for just a little bit.

I took myself to lunch at a small French café in Mill Valley.  I know the two women who run the place.  Having not been there for a while I was greeted with hugs and “where have you been?” I placed my order and sat down at a small table in the back of the café. I immediately plunged into solitary mode as I look at nonsense on my phone.  In a minute or two I was aware that an elderly man had taken up residence at the table next to me.  Walking with a cane he slowly settles his somewhat delicate frame onto the bench next to me.

Decision time:

I had the choice of continuing my solitary nonsense scrolling or engage.  Admittedly I withdrew from engagement and kept scrolling but….

“Do you live here?” My seat mate did not shrink from engagement.  As a matter of fact, he plunged right in.  He is a Scottish gentleman. His name is Callum.  He taught Asian comparative literature for years at Cornel University.  He was curious not only about where I lived but my ancestral heritage as well.  I wished my sister had been there because she knows Scotland well.  I was struggling to get beyond Edinburgh.  His wife, Debbie, arrived.  She was German and had taught at the private school my three oldest children had attended.  We spent the next minutes tracing our lineage and within the blink of time we had a pretty good sense of our lives and our very distant past.  We left a lot of discovery in-between if we had chosen to continue

I have thought about this encounter over the last several days and why it meant something to me.  The obvious is the importance of taking personal risk by exposing a little of yourself to another human who you have no context.  After only a few sentences it turns out that we did have context and what made the conversation interesting was that moment of discovery. 

The other obvious point is the more we bury ourselves in the isolation of scrolling the more we distance ourselves from the very thing that makes life interesting.  The warmth of discovery of another person. 

I give my unknown seat mate a lot of credit for engaging with me.  He engaged in a way that made his questions authentic.  Another person might have found it intrusive, but his inquiry and his gentle manner only made me more interested and less guarded about my answers.

I am sure he was an amazing professor even though his topic seems a bit far afield.  His natural curiosity only made me want to discover more about this charming couple.

My regret is that I did not stay longer as I am sure the conversation would have become far more detailed and interesting. My gratitude is for Prof. Callum who, once again, demonstrated that technology is amazing and valuable, but it is limiting.  It is limiting the world from experiencing the true delight in engaging with another human.  It allows us to play it safe, stay scrolling, as we hide inside our blank screen stare.  There we are, risk free, looking at our phones.

Take some risk ----  “Hello, do you live here?”

 I celebrate myself

And what I assume you shall assume,

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

“Leaves of Grass” ---- Walt Whitman (1855)