What chance encounters have shaped your life? Don’t you look back on them with a sense of wonder — what were the odds?! I’ll talk about this phenomenon and also put in a good word for its social cousin, small talk with strangers, even if you’re an introvert like me.
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Listen on YouTube:
A few resources:
Small talk doesn’t need to be meaningless: the benefits of talking to strangers
Planned happenstance and your career
Music: Jens East — Daybreak (ft. Henk) www.soundcloud.com/jenseast
Licence: Creative Commons Attribution V4.0
Transcription (remember, this is a direct transcription of what I said and is not actually how I write!):
Welcome to 9 Minutes of Wonder. I’m Betsy Hedberg. I hope this podcast will help you rekindle your sense of wonder for this awe-inspiring world. If you like what you hear in the next few minutes, please subscribe and share.
Hi everyone! So last week I was on a plane. They actually let people on through the back door, so I got on in the back and I had a window seat, and there were already a couple people in the aisle and middle seat. So I asked, “Can I please get into the window seat?” And the woman at the aisle stood up and turned around, and I knew her. She was my friend. We had no idea we were going to be going to the same place, let alone being on the same plane. So a chance encounter made my trip a lot more fun.
And then I went to stay with a friend who I met very much by chance during a breakout room on a Zoom call during the pandemic when nobody was leaving their home.
So chance encounters are really cool, aren’t they? I’m sure you’ve had chance encounters in your life. We’ve all had them. And some of them may have led to great things in your life, like how my parents met while my mom was walking with some college friends to a dance, and some guys, including her future husband, asked her…they drove up in the car and asked her if she wanted a ride.
And of course, some chance encounters can actually lead to suboptimal experiences. Like instead of marrying the person of your dreams, marrying the wrong person. That’s actually what happened to me. I should not have gone to that party on that night.
What does this have to do with wonder? I really think this is wonder-inspiring, because, I mean, what are the odds, right? Like you can think, “What are the chances that things could have gone just a little bit differently?” And the idea of chance and timing is totally awe-inspiring to me. And if you think about the chance encounters from your past, you probably agree.
What if things had been slightly different or someone had made a slightly different decision and your whole life could have been different?
My favorite personal chance-encounter story is how I met my current husband. We met in a ski town in Colorado. I went up there with the ski club, and my girlfriends and I had just arrived in the car from Denver. And we later learned that 10 minutes after we went through a particular area of interstate 70, an avalanche closed the road, and I never would have made it through to meet my future husband. That would have been entirely my fault because I was the one who forgot my ski pass and we had to turn around in Friday rush hour traffic so I could go home and get it. So that was a close call.
But it’s obviously not all about me. Maybe the biggest chance-encounter story of all time is the asteroid that led to the dinosaur extinction. So what if that asteroid had missed the earth 65 million years ago and the dinosaurs had therefore not gone extinct? Like nothing happened, everything carried on as normal and the dinosaurs kept roaming the earth. This is a real question that scientists have asked, and it would probably have meant that mammals would not have flourished and therefore that we humans would not exist. So make what you want of that thought experiment, but I think that is pretty awe-inspiring to think about.
On a sort of related note, there are many examples from history where we can ask what if chance had taken things in a different direction? For example, what if the head of the Soviet space program had not had a chance encounter with death on the operating table in 1966, but had instead survived to very possibly get Russians to the moon before America? That probably would have led for the Americans to fear that the Soviets would gain nuclear dominance over outer space, ratcheting up the Cold War and possibly leading to dueling military bases on the moon. I did not make this up — I saw a program where historians were speculating about it.
But I’ll return to the positive. You can find many chance-encounter stories on the internet, and as you might imagine, most of them are about love and a lot of them are about travel experiences. So I found a page that I’ll share on the notes here from CNN. These are three of the little headlines regarding chance encounters that people had:
“She traveled to Italy to save her marriage. Here’s how she ended up falling for her Italian tour guide.”
and
“She kissed a woman on the Trans-Siberian Railway 32 years ago. Then she flew across the world to find her.”
and
“She couldn’t stop thinking about the man she’d glimpsed when her ship visited a remote island. Then he wrote her a letter.”
So you get the idea and you can read some of those stories. They’re pretty fun.
That also leads me to a related topic, which is making spontaneous small talk with people.
If you know me at all, you probably know that although I’m not terribly shy, making small talk is not one of my strengths. I like not-small talk, actually. But I will say that some really exceptional experiences can happen when we’re open to making small talk with strangers, and some non-exceptional experiences that just make you feel good.
A lot of research shows that chatting with strangers makes us feel better even when it’s very small talk, like saying good morning to someone at a shop. And, you know, a lot of our encounters these days are so transactional. And I notice this in myself. I go into a shop and I just want to get out of there. But when we do things like that, our mood is worse. And studies are showing this.
For example, one researcher sent some people to Starbucks and asked some of the people to buy their coffee as efficiently as possible. Just go in, get some coffee and leave. And they asked the other people to go in, buy coffee, but strike up a conversation with the barista. And then they asked them questions about how they were feeling, and the people who had the conversation with the barista were in better moods and felt more connected to people and less isolated after going to Starbucks.
The same researcher who did the Starbucks study — her name is Gillian Sandstrom, I hope I pronounced her name right — also talks about how much we learn from talking with strangers, including in her own personal experience as well as her research.
She writes, “In one of my own first ‘talking to strangers’ experiences, I learned that people can ride ostriches! I’ll admit, this is not something that I needed to know, but it delighted me, and we can always use more moments of delight.”
I totally agree. I love that. I have seen videos of people riding ostriches. It looks, I don’t know, I feel a little bit worried about the ostrich’s back, but I don’t know much about it.
I used to live in the Netherlands, and one custom there that I really like is when you enter a doctor’s waiting room, you say “goedemorgen,” or “good morning” to the group that’s already there. It took me a little while to catch on to this, and they must have thought I was not a nice person or that I was stupid or something before I got it. I would just walk in and sit down. But I got it, and I started to say it too. And although it’s just a courtesy, and some people might do it in a really rote way, I still think it’s nice. Nobody enjoys being in the doctor’s waiting room, so a little greeting does help make things better, and it’s nice to be acknowledged.
In so many ways, many of us live much of our lives in these transactional and anonymous ways, as I mentioned a minute ago, but that can make us feel isolated and like we’re just on this treadmill of efficiency. At least I feel like that, and I’m really trying not to be that way.
If you happen to be living in a country where the main language is not your first language, as I do, then you have the added challenge and fun bonus of getting to practice your foreign language skills when you’re out and about, even if it’s just little bits of small talk. So it’s like you get to be in a better mood, and you get to practice speaking the language.
So I’ll wrap up by returning to the concept of chance encounters. By definition, you can’t plan for them, but you can practice what’s called “planned happenstance” by putting yourself in situations where they’re more likely to happen. So I encourage you to think about the chance encounters that you’ve had that have led to positive things in your life so far, and how you might open yourself to more of them, even today.
Thanks for listening, and I’ll talk to you next time.