No Stranger than a World Without Strangers

Happy birthday to my mom! Love you!

Thanks to the period when my mom was very much fascinated with Giordano, I’ve amassed a couple of their World Without Strangers shirts. I only wear them seldom during weekends nowadays since I don collared shirts for work but at least I still keep her happy when I wear them once in a while.

A world without strangers. Probably impossible. But that should not prevent us from taking steps toward it right? And the first thing I suggest we do is to cream the clique mentality.

First and foremost, it’s the mentality and not the clique. I’m not asking people to disengage from their cliques and be social butterflies fluttering from one group to the next. No. Belonging to a good group benefits us as good relationships are said to be an element of happiness. It’s the danger of confining oneself with one’s ingroup, your clique, and sealing off of oneself from the outgroup or the others that I want you to disengage from.

Where does the danger come from? Group status. As all relationships are, belonging to a group often takes time and effort. Thus, once we belong, we often regard our group as the sole, be all and end all clique of the universe. And more often than not, the group even amplifies such thinking. Cue in the mean girls and all other stereotyped cliques and their “we’re in, you’re out” mentality. And you know how those cliques often ended up. More rotten as a group and as individuals than before.

The solution to avoid such end is simple. Open yourself to other people. Regard everyone as part of your group even if they belong from other cliques, classes, countries or what have you. If we see and treat them as ours, then we’d be able to share ourselves with them and let them share themselves with us. Status would not even matter in a community where everyone sees everyone as equal and unique as they are. Such perspective might be valuable since only when we relate with other people, especially those very different from us, do we realize what it really means to be human.

A world without strangers might sound farfetched but a world with two less strangers a day must not be too much of a stranger to us.

Quick assignment for the week: Open up! Try small talk with people you wouldn’t usually talk to and surprise yourself where the conversation might lead you.