I was talking to a friend via text recently. She is living in Chicago, the place that I spent three months this summer. We spent three and a half months together last fall, doing theatre at the National Theatre Institute. We were each other’s directors, we cried together, worked together, ground our bodies against each other in the wildly intimate ways that our theatre teachers created the opportunities for. The closeness we achieved as an ensemble is unlike any other group relationship-- or individual relationship-- I can describe. We were this organism that lived and functioned and created together, and the person you wouldn’t be able to hold a conversation with if you went out to coffee became someone you rubbed your body against for hours on the floor with your eyes closed, and cried together at the beauty of it afterward. Someone who you trusted, implicitly, with showing a side of yourself that is dark, and ugly, and is usually tied tight in a little used corner of your self. The people who knew your darkest moment and your brightest, who knew exactly how long you could hold a downward dog, who knew your creativity but did not judge it. Or rather judged it, but if they judged it poorly than they also knew what your excelled at.
After three and a half months of this proximity, we disappeared into the corners of the States and went back to life where grokking was not accepted, we were allowed to sleep, and our creativity was not pressed to the point of oozing against our imagination. It was a hard shift. The hardest transition I have ever made. I cried and missed them for days.
So it was strange, that, in the three months I was in Chicago, I never saw Nikki. The first week I was there I tried desperately to. A free day, a play, coffee, drop by your place, five minutes between work, which goddam train are you on so I can take the same one!? She was busy, with work, with theatre, with friends. I tried to point out that I would gladly see her in the context of any of these activities, but the sentiment apparently didn't get through. The second week I tried less hard, the third week she went abroad, and the fifth week, when she was back, I stopped trying. She knew I was in Chicago. She hopefully was aware of how hard I had tried to see her. She could reach back. At that point I had other people, other community, and I was tired of doing all the work.
We finally reconnected again, we had plans to meet up with Josh, another of our ensemble mates who had just moved to town, we were going to see a play, dinner, something.... and then I left town.
Texting, a month later, things have changed. She needs to pick up more work-- what were my figure modeling contacts? She’s lonely, unsatisfied, and doesn’t know what she’s doing in her life or in Chicago. She’s unstimulated, and feeling stuck. I looked at the text, thought of sending a long, commiserating text, thought of calling, finally shrugged, and wrote back, Take the time to meditate, and meet a stranger a day.
An insane amount of stimulus comes from meeting people. Putting yourself out there, talking to strangers, being vulnerable, learning somebody new and something new about the world through them... My definition for “meeting” someone is if, when you get back from your shopping errand someone were to ask, what happened?, you could have a story to tell. You interacted with someone, learned a part of their story, you’ll remember them and they’ll remember you. And suddenly something happened to you that day because you caught traces of what it means to be a self-taught street musician, your guitar stolen regularly and your means to getting a new one. Of crossing the country in your semi truck, over and over, knowing the highways of each and every state with the intimacy that you know your own body. Of being an Australian soap opera star, trying to make it in LA, who spent a night dancing on the Venice Beach promenade with a traveling girl after she smiled a smile at him that “could only belong to a foreigner or an actor.”
These interactions make stories. Stories are what give our life shape, topography, newness. They make a day an adventure, something unique, in what might have been a monotonous replica of the day before that, and the day before that.
I don’t think I quite manage to meet a person a day: but when I’m bored, or lonely, or feeling under stimulated, I try to put myself in the position of interacting with strangers, and letting that interaction become more than the brushing of sleeves and smiles that are the extent of our normal socially accepted stranger interaction, and talk to these people.
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