Finding the friend in the stranger

I spent the weekend with 8 teenagers - 1 guy, 7 girls, and one other male adult. This was part of the Unitarian annual general meeting... I wouldn't normally go, but I was asked to help with the youth, and in the end, I'm really glad I did. The theme of the weekend was "Blessing the World". We had talked about how we could do this, and came up with a social witness activity of going out around Tacoma and meeting people we didn't know. We went out in pairs, and generally hit some of the same locations, but we did manage to stay by ourselves the whole time.

It was quite an interesting exercise, really observing how people are behaving today. Most everyone was polite and responded. It was a little harder to get beyond that into an actual conversation: sometimes we managed, sometimes we didn't. We had 3 or 4 pretty good conversations. The most interesting was with a guy who was probably early 20s, had a speech impediment, and is a comedian. He told us a joke, and it was about having a speech impediment and having to get on the short bus to school. If he can laugh at himself, so can we. He was funny.

Yet it was impressive, too, how many people really are closed off to seeing those around them. Even if we didn't talk to people - I was out with the amazing Keira from Woodinville, who did a great job - we smiled and said hi. For that, many people looked right past you or did not return the greeting, or even smile back. And then there were a lot of folks who either were busy texting or listening to music and clearly walled off from interacting. Sometimes we talked to them anyway... but it was much harder to break through there.

Something Keira did that was hilarious was at the Museum of Glass. These guys were taking a picture of their friend in front of the museum of glass. So Keira stood 30 ft. back in the background of the photo striking muscle poses. Someday, the person will look at that photo and go, "What is that girl doing?" and it will be hilarious.

This led to the youth creating a service for later that was about "finding the friend in the stranger" and ended with the youth using the line, "there are no strangers, only friends you haven't met yet." It was a fabulously successful service, I thought. (Yeah yeah, I helped create it.) We had people share interactions with strangers they had, both successful and unsuccessful. The funniest was a guy who talked about going on a rafting trip in Utah with several Mormons, and how after a day they started talking and realized they share a lot of the same values: "Neither of us wanted our kids to be promiscuous or do drugs! Oh wow!" We were howling. How many parents do you know who want their kids to be promiscuous or do drugs???

We did a spiral dance, too, where as people went past one another, we asked them to look people in the eye, and smile; and if they wanted to, to say something affirming to others. I was amazed at how many people failed to look me in the eye. It's a tough thing to maintain.

I realized some new things from this weekend... one, how much we all have crawled into ourselves. Two, that most people are lovely, and those who aren't, are polite. Three, that often those on the margins are the neatest people to talk to.... the guy with the speech impediment, a guy holding the sign for new homes, a woman with a walker. Two of our youth were out with a Free Hugs sign, and their favorite was a homeless guy. And finally, there's a lot of people out there I want to meet and I don't know who they are yet. It was a great restorative weekend for feeling good about people.

I work with youth not so much to stay young, but to remember what it's like to really learn and grow and to challenge my own boundaries... to stay more open to others, to know there is more to be done and challenges to tackle. And maybe, just maybe, to get a little bit of their energy rubbing off on me.