There’s certainly no dearth of happy childhood tales or games that promote the benefits of interacting with others. The independent-minded heroes of adventures far and wide—Pinocchio, Alice, Dorothy Gale, Stuart Little—all relied on help from benevolent strangers. In the board game Tokaido, choosing to meet a stranger along the way always leads to some sort of reward. Alas, in real life, city dwellers nose-to-shoulder in subways and on congested sidewalks are all too adept at acknowledging one another’s presence yet not engaging. “We learn to ignore people and to be ignored by them,” Alan Westin said, “as a way of achieving privacy.”
But as Epley wrote, sometimes our beliefs about what will make us happy are wrong. Strangers give us an opportunity to meet people living entirely different lives from our own. Whether in the hotel lobby, the library, the bar, or on an overnight flight, they can point the way, or add cheer on a winter morning, like the delivery man who called out to me with small-town geniality, “Happy Valentine’s Day!” as we passed on the sidewalk. Or the immigrations officer at a New York airport who after handing my passport back greeted me with, “Welcome home,” instantly making me feel part of the tribe. New York is where I unpack my bag. It’s where I’ve met most of my favorite people. We, too, were strangers once.
Kio Stark, who taught a course on strangers at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, has said that a “fleeting intimacy” (on the street, on the subway, ride-sharing through UberPool) can make us feel part of a larger community and lead to new perspectives and connections.
Yet for many of us the thought of striking up a conversation with a stranger may be uncomfortable, even anxiety-provoking. And, of course, different cultures have different norms when it comes to such interactions. In the United States, the Project for Public Space has found that when we feel comfortable speaking with strangers, we tend to feel a stronger sense of place or attachment to our communities.
Obviously, technology can help facilitate these connections. Airbnb, for instance, offers its Experiences in the form of local tours and activities, like one in Florence that involves following a member of the Tuscan Truffle Hunters Association through the countryside, or one in New York that includes enjoying Latino food and a freestyle rap session in Spanish Harlem. But how do you go about doing so spontaneously?
Stark has some suggestions in her book When Strangers Meet and in a related TED Talk. Some exercises are designed to get us accustomed to interacting with others, like smiling when we pass someone, giving someone a compliment about something he or she is wearing, or striking up a conversation not by talking directly to the stranger, but to his or her dog or baby. Another involves what the urbanist William H. Whyte called triangulation: using an object (like a sculpture) or an event (a mime’s performance) that both you and a stranger can see, as a jumping-off point for conversation.
It’s not uncommon for passing strangers to be privy to confidences that have the feeling of a confessional, one that may not have been shared with friends and family, as the sociologist Georg Simmel described in his early-nineteenth-century essay “The Stranger.” After all, the stranger is anonymous. The stranger will move on.
To practice becoming more comfortable with strangers, Stark created a series of urban expeditions that we can try on our own, in order of how challenging they are, at ideas.ted.com/how-to-talk-to-strangers. Some of the cards in the Anywhere Travel Guide card deck (described in the Florence section of this book) may also be helpful: They instruct the reader to stop a stranger and ask what his or her favorite street is, or where to shop or eat. There’s an “introduction” card, too, which can be handed to a stranger, allowing for a gracious hello.
Opportunities for interactions are all around: in bookshops, with museum security guards, cashiers at grocers, waiters, fellow people in line. Members of a Facebook group called the Community of Single People, created by Bella DePaulo, the researcher and author of Singled Out, answered a question I posed about how they meet others by saying it’s simply through doing the things they love. A runner said that practically every time he travels alone he participates in a half marathon or marathon: “You’ve instantly got a common interest.”
A woman who likes to bicycle solo said that while she prefers to ride alone “because cycling is, for me, about solitude and meditation, never a social activity,” she has no trouble making friends along the way. “Being alone on a bike is all the ice breaker I’ve ever needed. People are drawn to my adventure and want to be part of it.”
While Stark enjoys talking to strangers, she’s realistic about the parameters of such experiences. “As a woman, particularly, I know that not every stranger on the street has the best intentions,” she said in her TED Talk. “It is good to be friendly, and it’s good to learn when not to be, but none of that means we have to be afraid.” Although other people may do their best to convince you that you should be fearful: The comedian Jen Kirkman tells a story in one of her stand-up routines about going to Venice by herself. Friends and family expressed a mixture of concern and distaste. “I was excited for this trip before people started putting a damper on it,” she says. She then goes on to describe how her father asked why she wasn’t afraid to be traveling on her own, raising the specter of ISIS. Her response: “I’m just busy being afraid of plain old men, are you kidding me?”
There’s a terrible truth in that. In February 2016, two young female Argentinian backpackers traveling in Ecuador were raped and killed. Much online chatter argued that they shouldn’t have been traveling alone. For one thing, they weren’t, in fact, alone; they were together. What some critics seemed to be implying is that they shouldn’t have been traveling without men. Solo women travelers around the world fired back on social media, posting photos of themselves alone in far-flung places, be it with the Crown Jewels in London or a monkey forest in Ubud, with the hashtag #ViajoSola—“I travel alone.”
There’s no foolproof set of precautions to take, though experts say that one of our best defenses is something we already have: our gut. Even behavioral science scholars who have studied the benefits of talking to strangers advise against overriding any instincts we have about the safety of a particular situation or another person. “Our intuition often knows what’s best for us even when our thinking minds do not understand yet what’s going on,” as an article in Psychology Today put it. (For guidance about safety, see the Tips and Tools section at the back of this book.)
The journalist Stephen J. Dubner, perhaps best known for his collaboration with the economist Steven D. Levitt on Freakonomics, has pointed out on his blog that our fear of strangers usually outstrips any actual danger. He’s written that in the United States, for instance, crimes such as rape and murder typically involve people the victims know. I’m always cautious, but if I never engaged strangers, I would miss out on a big part of what makes solo travel, not to mention life, fun.
Take, for example, the time I was waiting for my flight to New York from Florence in the Amerigo Vespucci Airport. I noticed a willowy, black-haired woman alone by the gate. When I arrived at my seat, she was in the one beside me. I nodded hello and settled in.
“Are you a journalist or an actress?” she said.
Had I been gifted with the ability to raise an eyebrow, it would have been the perfect occasion.
“Journalist,” I said. “How did you know?”
She noticed me as I had noticed her, the way any creature recognizes its own kind. She explained that she had been in Florence writing for a fashion blog and held a stick of gum in my direction. Before long, we were 36,000 feet in the air and talking like friends about our jobs and cities. She was French, living in Paris. We exchanged emails. When we landed at Paris–Charles de Gaulle—me for my connection, she for home—she pointed me toward my connecting flight and hugged me goodbye. Au revoir.
She went right; I went left. I pictured us on either side of an ocean, both writing, one awake whi
le the other slept.
A few days after I returned to New York I received an email. Subject: “Let us keep connected.” It was from my airplane double. “It’s been a real pleasure travelling with you” she wrote. “I would be glad to see you again. Let me know when you are back in Paris.”
And just like that—an invitation.
Ode to the West Village
I strolled along with my heart expanding at the thought that I was citizen of great Gotham, a sharer in its magnificence and pleasures, a partaker in its glory and prestige.
—O. Henry, “The Four Million”
A city is different things to us at different times—of the day, of the year, of our life. Many years have passed since I was in the backseat of the car, taken with the razzle-dazzle. Today, I’m more drawn to the neighborhood coffee shops, or modest old parks like Abingdon Square in Greenwich Village, where farmers come to sell cheese and eggs under the London Plane trees. I have a soft spot for the little urban islands like McCarthy Square, with its birdhouses—some with simple peak roofs; others with multiple stories and decks, made of miniature wood logs, like ski chalets—that poke out from shrubs and evergreens. I like the quiet of the West Village in the morning, where sidewalk chalkboards outside restaurants and coffee shops promise caffeine and better days, and streets paved with setts—Jane, West 12th, Bethune, Bank—feed into Washington Street like streams emptying into a river.
Downtown, things are of a human scale. The streets are crooked. You aren’t oppressed by the city’s grid, by vertiginous buildings and long avenues. There are row houses with window boxes and low gates decorated with cobwebs on Halloween and plastic beads on Mardi Gras. You can get pleasantly lost. You can see the sky.
I’ve lived much of my life on the Upper West Side, but downtown has a particular lure. Because it doesn’t conform to Manhattan’s grid, it’s almost like being in a different city altogether, making the joy of discovery, and all the other virtues of being alone, that much easier to appreciate.
I used to take long walks only in good weather. Now I do so in any weather. When I travel, my favorite way to acquaint myself with a city is to walk it. Why not do the same in my hometown? As of 2017, New York has the highest big-city Walk Score in the nation, a ranking based on a location’s population density, block length, distance from amenities, and pedestrian friendliness. I’d always walked a fair amount in Manhattan. But after Paris, Istanbul, and Florence, I ditched my heavy shoulder bag and bought a backpack, which enabled me to walk longer and farther, hands-free, without pain in my shoulder and without worrying that on snowy, slippery nights, I’d lose my balance. On the coldest days I put on fleece and down and took to the streets of Manhattan dressed for the Adirondacks.
Lo and behold, the walking boosted my spirits—if not my style—and possibly my health, too. Commutes by car and mass transit have been shown to increase stress and blood pressure. Off the subway, back on the sidewalk, my cheeks burned from the wind. I got snowed on, rained on, splashed with mud, and arrived everywhere with matted hair and a runny nose and still, I was happier. Research from McGill University published in the journal Transportation Research found that of four thousand people who commuted—on foot or by bus, subway, or train—in the midst of a snowy Montreal winter, it was the walkers who had the least stressful commute, despite the weather.
“The heart sees the joy of early dawn, the breeze,” wrote Rumi. “What have you seen? What have you not seen?” One reason Village walks are so appealing is how slow the neighborhood can be to wake while the rest of Manhattan is already buzzing, offering an opportunity to savor its little streets, and the time and space for reflection.
Walking through the Village, I took inventory of the changes that had taken place—or not—since my travels. In Paris, Comptoir Turenne was still serving coffee on the sleepy end of the street. In Florence, the seasons were still standing at the corners of the Ponte Santa Trìnita. I still couldn’t let go of my iPhone.
Other things were gone. My friends sold the house on the bay. Leonard Cohen died, as had Vito Acconci. Istanbul was rocked by attacks. Today, even as the city is building a state-of-the-art airport, the State Department has warned Americans to reconsider travel to Turkey because of terrorism and travel bans that have prevented them from leaving the country. I have yet to go back.
“One of the laws of travel, one of the laws of the kingdom,” Fred Bryant said, “is it must end.”
But I still hear the muezzin. I hear the ships’ horns, the gull’s cry, the ticking of time in the Museum of Innocence. Even in New York, when the snow is falling and crunches softly underfoot, I can summon the sounds of faraway places. I hear Paris: the soft click of a bicycle chain on a sunny afternoon, children playing soccer in the churchyard, spring rain through the open window. I hear the fountains in Florence, footsteps on cobblestones, the nighttime hum of the piazza beyond the shutters.
The experiences we look back on don’t have to be extraordinary to be gratifying. In fact, studies by scholars at Harvard Business School published in the journal Psychological Science found that we tend to underestimate the pleasure of rediscovering our ordinary, everyday experiences through things like journal entries and letters. We’re more apt, however, to chronicle major life events and yearly vacations, not necessarily the quotidian. And that may be a missed opportunity. For instance, in one study the researchers found that university students who had created time capsules of mundane information—notes about recent conversations, social outings, songs they were listening to—had significantly underestimated their interest when they revisited the capsules a mere three months later. Another study found that people underestimated how much pleasure they would get from reading something they wrote about a “typical” experience with their partner.
“We generally do not think about today’s ordinary moments as experiences that are worthy of being rediscovered in the future,” lead researcher Ting Zhang told the Association for Psychological Science. “However, our studies show that we are often wrong: What is ordinary now actually becomes more extraordinary in the future—and more extraordinary than we might expect.”
We can’t always escape to Paris or Istanbul. Nor do we always want to. Savoring the moment, examining things closely, reminiscing—these practices are not strictly for use on the road. They’re for everyday life, anywhere. In fact, you can begin right now if you like with a savoring practice that Bryant and Veroff created called the Daily Vacation. Here’s how it works:
Each day for a week, plan and take a daily vacation by doing something that you enjoy for twenty minutes or more. The vacation can be something as simple as going for a walk around your neighborhood, or thumbing through a book on gardening. Aim to be in the moment, and “to see things as if for the first or last time.”
The Daily Vacation can be taken on a shoestring budget, Bryant points out, and there are no security lines to contend with. For him, a Daily Vacation sometimes means making a journey to the past by reminiscing about a former trip. He may “re-enter” that experience by holding a precious, almost sacred, memento, like the diary his father kept when they vacationed together on a mountain in Colorado—just as I may summon Paris by listening to Henri Salvador’s “Ma chansonnette,” which I once heard at the Relais Christine, a Left Bank hotel housed in a former mansion with cats that flash here and there. To heighten the effects of the Daily Vacation, Bryant suggests planning the next day’s vacation at the end of the current one so there’s something positive to look forward to, as well as something to look back on.
On a winter morning in the Village I went through an iron gate on Hudson Street into the gardens of the Church of Saint Luke in the Fields. Snow was thawing on the flowerbeds. “Please respect the sanctuary of this space,” said a sign covered in bare vines. Visitors were asked not to use cell phones. I stopped beside a bench with a little memorial plaque and bent down to read the last line of Shelley’s “Ode to t
he West Wind”—“If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”—which he wrote in a wood that skirts the Arno, near Florence.
With only a few minutes before my first meeting of the day, I left the garden and walked toward 10th Street, noticing an empty beer can roll under a parked truck and listening to the chiming of bells. I passed the red doors to the Three Lives & Company bookstore on my way to Jack’s Stir Brew Coffee.
The wood tables at Jack’s are almost always taken when I go, which is reassuring, as it means the place will likely still be there when I show up again. I ordered my usual: the Dirty Harry with almond milk, which is basically a vanilla latte. It’s warm, never hot, instantly ready to meet your lips.
I returned to the sidewalk, cup in hand. The city, my city, first came into view through a backseat window. It came on the other side of a long, dim tunnel, in passing flashes of headlights, in darkened theaters and restaurants. Now I see it on foot in the first light, the time of delivery trucks and dog walkers; when a construction site shudders to life with the slow swing of a crane, everywhere the skeleton of a building getting its skin.
After taking my city for granted, complaining about its pace, its smells, its noise, its people, its anonymous buildings blocking the sky, it’s romancing me. I pass the dog walkers, the bridges, the kayakers and houseboats on the Hudson, the wabi-sabi streets and stoops, and am thankful that in less than twenty-three square miles the city provides both profound solitude—and also the very best people with whom to break it.
Alone Time Page 17
