The Kindness of Strangers

This blog is about showing hospitality to the foreigner traveling in a strange land, because I am grateful.


“The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.” - Samuel Johnson

   Back home in California, I tended to fall back on my introverted nature as an excuse not to be hospitable, even to people who were visiting from other countries. Even though I said that I wanted to tour the world, meet loads of people, see how they lived,  and even though I went to a school of international studies, I rarely made it to all the soirees, BBQs, dinners, get-togethers, and socials to which I was invited and which would probably have introduced me to those very people I was so eager to meet. Dagobert D. Runes writes that people travel to observe in other countries precisely those people that we ignore at home, and I'm afraid this was true in my case. It's my loss, really, but I also never really believed that my presence would make that much of a difference to a foreigner.

  Here is another thing that travel has taught me, not by telling, but by showing me: that not many of my old habits are worth holding on to. That maybe some of them were more than a little selfish. As I make my way through the thousand million actions and dreams whirling around in people's brains, colored by their own experiences and memories, all their many thoughts and spoken words and actions combine to teach me the goodness of hospitality.

My friend Hanne recently wrote in her own blog about how frustrating it was to have to wait to find community when you move somewhere new. What is already a lonely experience can be even more terrifying because you can't find a place to be like home-- somewhere outside of yourself that can bring you peace when your inner emotions won't allow it. You don't know where people are with whom you can connect and where they are more receptive to you because you don't know where they are living.

So, all this observing and experiencing has brought home a few things, and these things are: depending on the kindness of strangers, you can get to know what a country looks like, or you can get to know what a country is like. Depending on the kindness of strangers, you can make friends all over the world, so that you can be a visitor, and not a stranger, in a strange land. Depending on the kindness of strangers makes you more, not less bold, because you have already seen how good and generous and helpful people can be, and so you are no longer afraid to ask for help. Depending on them means that you really don't have to be cold, and hungry, and afraid. Depending on the kindness of strangers is living life in more dimensions, a more full and colored existence. Depending on the kindness of strangers, you are more grateful for the life you have been given and you can help others be grateful also.

For people who have aided, abetted, encouraged, engaged, and invited me into a new dialogue with the world and its people around me, thanks.