It's good to talk

I've posted in the past about the power of talking to friends or people in your network who can provide support when you most need it... or vice versa. But how about the power of conversation with a stranger?


This morning I got onto the train in my normal frame of mind - paper in hand intending to read a bit / reflect a bit on the day ahead. I was heading into Reading so a short journey, hence not immediately getting the laptop out. The man next to me smiled and said "Lovely day isn't it?" to which I replied "It is - make the most of it, the rain is on its way again I believe." Train etiquette would normally dictate that the conversation ended there, but he followed it up with "Do you do this journey often?" What passed through my mind was 'he wants to chat - do I make and excuse and bury my head in something, or make the time for him...' so I did the latter. We then had a brief but deeply personal conversation given we had never met before - amazing really in the circumstances. In a 15 minute journey I learnt his wife has MS and is almost completely immobile now although the benefits system would like to classify her fit for work, he is off to London for 4 days on a training course, and worries if she'll be ok. He has 3 grown up sons and the youngest one worries him most on a day to day basis - particularly as he feels that his wife's illness and the big age gap between the first 2 and the youngest means he hasn't had the same start to life. He is a mathematician and manages the complex machines which build data models which predict the impact of disease epidemics, and more.  Wow - so much information in such a short time. So easy to tell a stranger what you might not tell a friend. We ended it with him saying his day was better for having had a friendly companion for at least part of his journey, and me feeling lifted by the power of conversation. It could so easily have been different and both our days would have been slightly less for having not made the effort.


This is a bit like the question "How are you?" - when we ask we often get a bland response ("I'm fine!"), but it only takes a few minutes in the right frame of mind to get to a much deeper level of enquiry and empathy. Really meaning it when you ask how someone is, and then taking the time to properly listen to their response might make all the difference to someone's day. Clearly we don't have time to spend 15 minutes with everyone we meet, and not everybody needs to have that level of enquiry into how they are (most of us are fine most of the time), so then the art is to be able to recognise when it's appropriate and beneficial to take more time to listen, to talk, to be there for someone - stranger or friend.