by Alexi Weasel

Created on: June 02, 2011

In life we meet so many different people some of them become really good friends and dear friend who remain in our lives for the rest of our lives, but do we ever notice all the strangers that we encounter every day. I recently made my first eighty mile round trip in the car alone and I have never done this before I was on lonely country roads and motorways and found myself watching the drivers around me and one driver I followed for about thirty miles before they turned off. I quickly learnt that this driver was a smoker, was a woman, had the national radio one blaring out, was a careful driver followed the speed limits and didn't chuck their litter out the window or use their phone whilst driving.

Then it dawned on me we can learn so much about other people by how we encounter them everyday and another persons behaviour and their habits. Then it also dawned on me the people that we work with and the people who serve us in a shop slowly they soon start to stop being strangers to us as we are learning to know them.

All the billions of people in the world and we talk to so few of them it is so sad all the people that we see everyday and the very few people that we actually talk to and try to get to know.

When I was in Accident and Emergency I met my other half, there was a magazine about Steven Fry on the chair next to me and I was laughing at it, even though I was in a lot of pain my other half moved the magazine and sat down next to me, I had a back injury from karate and he had brought his friend suffering with indigestion who thought he was actually having an heart attack. When we tell people how we met they are always incredulous about how we met. But this was a simple case of two people talking and exchanging numbers.

We don't realise it but all our friends at one point were strangers whether we are still best friends with our friend from school or someone we went to Church with or someone from work, they were all strangers to start with and it takes a lot of courage to talk to people. In my lunch breaks on my old job I would sit in a bench and watch people walking past and sometimes people would sit next to me and start talking to me and for half an hour I would have a conversation with a complete stranger. I did this a lot they were mostly tourists but it was nice to talk to someone new about the weather, or my town or about good places to eat.

But humans were meant to interact and not to judge others by the way that they look and the way that they sound and their colour I have always been a shy person but in these last few years nothing gives me more happiness than to talk to strangers

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