This post was written by Courtney Bulsiewicz, Assistant Academic Director of the BYU Humanities Center.
When I was a child and would have to ride in the car for any amount of time, I would look in the cars next to ours and imagine the lives of those that passed us, slipped behind us, or were going the opposite direction. I saw a young man with a white plastic basket in the back of his silver Geo Storm and imagined him as a college student going home on break, with a month’s worth of laundry, sleeping in until 10, filling up on pot roast instead of frosted flakes. I saw a trucker and wondered what treats he was going to bring home to his loved ones; when my grandfather came home after his runs to California, he brought hot sauces and suckers with insects in them. Maybe, like my grandpa, the trucker would talk the distributor out of a whole box of artichokes, would bring them home and boil half of them all at once, set them in a bowl on his daughter’s dining room table, and invite everyone to come dip the soft green petals in mayonnaise and lemon juice, sucking the flesh from the strange vegetable. I bet, like my grandpa, the trucker would caution his family against eating the hairy heart—a choking hazard. But maybe not; he probably wasn’t trucking artichokes at all. I’ll never really know.
French Philosopher Emmanuel Levinas argues that though it’s impossible for us to breach the wall of “the other,” we have a moral responsibility to respond to the distance inherent in it. Lately, I’ve been wrestling with how to respond to the distance between “the other” and myself. How can I engage the stranger before me? I have a yearning to break down what separates us—to gain meaningful direction and orientation by trying to understand lives different from my own. But I keep finding that this desire to know others runs against much of what I, and many of us, are taught as children.
For years many of us are warned about “the other,” given calls such as “Warning! Stranger Danger!,” “Don’t talk to strangers,” “Don’t take candy from a stranger.” I’m sure this advice has saved many from harmful situations. But I wonder if it also kept and keeps us from potential positive ones; from connecting with “the other” and learning that it’s okay to talk to people—that communication is what community is all about. I struggle with this idea a lot as a mother of two young boys. I wrestle with the balance between caution and curiosity. If I never allow my children to talk to strangers, how will “others” become anything else? Yet, if I decide to guide them in engaging with “the other” more consciously, how do I protect them? Yes, I know I can use intuition and plain ol’ street smarts, but those can still fail me.
Some have called my previous actions toward strangers naïve and dangerous, and I have gotten myself in scary situations. I once tried to engage with a man on the street by just making eye contact and saying “good evening.” Walking alone back to my hotel in Downtown Berkeley, perhaps I shouldn’t have spoken to anyone. But I wanted to dissolve the wall separating me from so many “others.” I didn’t know he would follow me around, yelling at me as I hurried down Bancroft. I only wanted a brief moment of connection, but I felt the universe was correcting me. I was definitely frightened after that encounter, but it also frightens me to consider walking through life and closing myself off.
Interactions with strangers haven’t always been dangerous. Several times I’ve been surprised by how positive some encounters with “the other” have been. When I was a young 21-year-old getting off my late shift at 2am in Salt Lake City, I found my car out of gas. A woman insisted she and her dog walk with me to the closest gas station. I was hesitant because I had no idea who she was or what her intentions were, but she insisted. She was taking her dog for a walk and thought I could use a little protection. When we got back to my car with the gas can, I gave her and her pit bull a ride home and thanked her for her thoughtfulness. It was beautiful to me how we disregarded the fact that she didn’t know me, and I didn’t know her, and we both got in a car with a stranger; we trusted the other and it turned out just fine–beautiful even.
Another night, probably around ten, I got a phone call from an unknown number. For some reason, I decided to answer it. We ended up talking for about a half hour, inviting the other into our world, talking about how he was in between jobs, and I was nannying two darling little girls. We exchanged names and obviously had each other’s numbers, but we never talked again. It was just a strange moment when we both wanted to talk to someone, even if we didn’t know who that someone was. I think I was drawn to the mystery. I think I’m drawn to the mysteries of all the people that surround me. I know it would be physically, mentally, emotionally impossible for me to know everyone in a somewhat meaningful or even superficial way. But I find myself wanting to do just that. Every person seems interesting; I want to know where they come from, where they are going, where and how they grew up, their struggles, successes.
I still imagine others and what their otherness consists of like I did when I was a young girl. I found myself at the airport this Christmas, looking around baggage claim, making up stories about the reunions I saw. I wondered where the two old couples were spending their holiday, and imagined their adult children probably visiting their in-laws in an “off-year” for both of their families. I noticed the lone traveler in business attire, cell phone glued to ear, his other hand patting a black leather crossover. I was sure once that call to his boss ended, he would remove his blazer, throw it over his bag, unbutton his collar and sleeves, grab a pre-made plastic-wrapped sandwich from the news stand, sit down, and unwind, eating furiously, so he could make another call–this time to his fiancée he can’t wait to join. But, of course, I was making so many assumptions. Born out of my own experiences, hopes, fears. Not theirs. The airport, while a people-watcher’s dream, is also a reminder of just how many strangers are out there that will always remain strangers.
Even as I’m writing this, I have to ask myself, what would make someone no longer a stranger? Just knowing a name and the reason for travel? I think it would have to be more than that. At times, I still feel like an unknown to those who have been a part of my life for years, and I wonder if it is ever possible to not be “others,” to one another, to overcome the boundaries of experience that separate us.
We are all strange to one another—different people living lives separately. People join my life, but not my mind. And I can’t join theirs. Even to my husband, as much as I have invited him in, there are still unknowns; perhaps not conscious ones, and perhaps generally tiny insignificant ones, but there are definitely things still “other” about both of us. Like the fact that he was taken aback when I knew all the words to a random 70s song, singing it to him in the car while he chuckled with surprise. A silly, strange, and simple thing that never came up before, but which gave us pause and excitement that, after 17 years of knowing each other, there is still so much to be learned. I think I’m beginning to submit that Emmanuel Levinas was right about “the other,” that it is impossible to completely overcome otherness that makes us strangers. My imaginations, while born out of a desire to connect with others, is really just turning “the other” into a version of myself. When this difficult-to-reconcile thought comes, that I am the only one who really knows me, and that I can never fully know someone else, I see it as a challenge rather than an impasse. Just because I can’t, doesn’t mean I shouldn’t try.
