don_hoodventures

So you’re pushing your shopping cart down the frozen vegetable aisle at Kroger’s, and coming from the other direction is a young employee pulling a cart with stacks of boxes. What do you do, if anything?

Options: Stare straight ahead at the brussels sprouts in the freezer case and ignore (or pretend to ignore) the guy with the cart.

When he says “hi,” you pretend not to hear him.

When he says “hi,” you turn in his direction and give him a friendly nod and say “Hey, how ya doin’?”

You take the initiative and catch his attention and say, “Hi, how are ya?”

The young fellow in the grocery store is just one of the dozens of people we may meet in the course of an average day as we go about our work and do our errands. Other folks we are always running into: the cashier at that Kroger store, an unknown person you pass in the Best Buy parking lot, the cleaning person at your apartment complex, the person you pass on the walking trail, the order taker at Burger King. And the list goes on.

Why are these brief encounters with our fellow human beings worth talking about anyway? Well, because these short moments can, I believe, add meaning to the daily lives of the people we meet, and their initiatives and reactions to our own efforts can have an impact on our daily lives.

In my own case, I was painfully shy most of my life. I was the kind of person who looked down at his shoes when someone was approaching. I rarely said anything at all to the cashier at Walgreen’s except maybe a muffled “hi.” And if they tried to engage me in conversation, I’d escape as fast as I could.

As I have gotten older, I have become much more sociable and self-confident. In my past two jobs, I have encountered literally hundreds of people each day. One job was in terminal operations at a major airport, and the other was as an usher in a major league baseball stadium. I came to enjoy and get a lot of satisfaction from common interactions with the public and employees. It became my habit to be the first to say “hi” or “hey, what’s going on?” or “everything going OK?” along with a handshake or fist-bump if it was someone I knew. Of course, it’s a given that when I ask “Hey, what’s going on?” that I don’t really expect the person to stop and tell me in detail how their shift is going. Sometimes just a fist-bump in return to my words is perfectly fine and acceptable. In all cases, there’s an acknowledgement that we’re two human beings who work in the same place and there is a connection between us. For me, even these five-second interchanges brighten my day. And I hope that my gesture brightens their day a bit, too.

But I’ve noticed that not everyone appreciates these random encounters. It’s impossible to know what is in someone’s head when they pass me in the parking lot at the mall and won’t make eye contact with me. It could be they’re just having a bad day. But too many times the ones who pass me by are executive “suits” who must think they are better than I—that they’re smarter, richer, and better looking than the older fellow wearing the Astros t-shirt. I can tell, because they walk by me with their noses so high in the air they can’t even see me. Or they hurriedly look down at their phones as if they’ve just received a text from their stock broker. (Although I sometimes think they look at their phones for no reason at all but to avoid eye contact with me.) I have to laugh when big crowds give an executive no choice but to walk within a couple of feet of me, in which case I often get a grimace apparently meant to be a smile.

Another reason not to look at me or ignore my “hi” is shyness or social awkwardness. As I said, I used to be very shy until fairly recently so I have sympathy with these folks. I know how painful the simplest interaction with a stranger can be. But having been like this myself, I have some advice for you shy people out there. Practice. Try it. Try smiling at the bank teller, even if you don’t feel like it. Try saying “hi” to the mail carrier even if you’ve never done it before. There’s an old saying, “Fake it ‘til you make it.” Soon it becomes a habit and you just might find your day enriched by these brief contacts.

On the other hand, I’m not out to change anyone, and if these little interchanges just aren’t for you, we’ll all survive. When someone doesn’t acknowledge my smile or wave of the hand, my day isn’t ruined and I don’t think any worse of you.

But one thing does make me sad. In all those years when I was so shy, how many times did I fail to see smiles or friendly waves because I was looking down at my shoes? How many times did I miss opportunities to have my day brightened by the kindness of a stranger?