iv/ fifth pocket: strangers

I wanted to add an empty pocket here

Here’s an idea I carry around in a mental pocket. Are there any strangers, really? Or are there just people we don’t know yet and connections we haven’t discovered?

The improbable

When I travel I notice improbable situations. I see the same strangers repeatedly. It has become a personal point of honor to notice familiar strangers. I think I naturally notice a lot of details, and I am not sure how many details other people notice. There is something about the improbable that is part of playing. I met five men hiking with one of their sons. They were provisioning a father son team that I had met three days earlier and again the prior day. What about the little I knew of the father and his son and the five men and the son of one of them led me to ask, if they were hiking in to meet the former? I asked a friend if it were obvious to him? He said it never would have occurred to him to assume the connection or to ask after it.

This first example tends toward recognizing strangers. Another example was learning layer by layer that the stranger in front of me was someone I had known decades earlier. The string of questions which began as social pleasantry, veered toward a set outcome. This stranger across from me had to be a high school student in the class ahead of me with whom I worked on a project. Not recognizing the other created a strange perspective.



The Unexpected
Noticing the unexpected and including it in a worldview serves as a structure within play. Lightly holding onto observations of our environment helps increase our relationship with the unexpected. Trusting intuitive knowing helps. This might  be exercising the right hemisphere of the brain. The right hemisphere processes information spatially and may be responsible for making connections among random events so that they form meaning. In this manner we can arrive at knowledge without knowing all the details required to build that knowledge. Part of living playfully draws on that aspect of our mental process that allows us to see the whole picture without necessarily knowing many of the details. A hologram offers a way to think of the process, where knowing one detail allows that bit of information to reconstruct the whole. Playful experience has the potential to develop greater confidence in our intuition.

Making a detour through a friend’s yard to get back on track to where I was headed, I ran into a young man taking photographs of a cat in tree. I hadn’t noticed him when I turned in, and so, surprised I introduced myself and we talked about his name and how he was named after an ancestral scholar. I had run across the scholar’s name in a family tree and upon checking realized that ten generations back his foremother and my forefather had been siblings. He had to stand in the path that I hadn’t intended to take and I had to ask this series of questions to discover this other trail through time.