Have you ever noticed just how much it can raise your spirits when someone you don’t know zaps you with a beam of sunlight? Maybe a lovely old lady out walking her little dog shot at you with her smile as you passed her in the park on your way to work and then followed it up with an almost fanfare-like “Good morning!’” once she detected your receptivity. Or maybe as you were picking up a few bits on your way home, the nice chap on the tills at Asda noticed the hint of melancholy in your energy and decided to ‘step in’ with a joke so ridiculously silly that you became defenceless to cooperating with his intention?
Did you realise how the effect is amplified in proportion to how familiar you are with the person dishing out the goods, with those kindnesses originating from complete strangers carrying the most weight? It is of course, always welcomed and appreciated that the dedicated gentleman out tending to his front garden every day never fails to greet you on your passing by, but when someone you’ve never crossed paths with before in your life unleashes the full force of their selflessness on you then the afterglow can live on for quite some time.
I’m sure for those of us whose lives are jam-packed full of friends, family and acquaintances, interactions with strangers can almost fade into complete insignificance, but for some people, a stranger can play a much more important role, because that as-yet-unregistered face can actually embody the ‘everyone else in the world’ (everyone who isn’t a friend, family member or acquaintance), and that can be an incredibly powerful thing.
There’s a certain, quite vulnerable group of people for whom this idea can be a potent antidote to a specific type of poison they’ve been unfortunate to ingest, and being the caring and compassionate human beings that we are, we would of course, like to find a reliable way to administer it. The only ‘problem’ we face is that it’s practically impossible to identify who falls into that group, so our only option is to target a wider selection that’s likely to include those people, and that wider selection is anyone you see out in the world alone.
So, let’s say you’re out doing your weekly food shop with your partner, and whilst you’re foraging in the fruit and veg aisle for your all-important supply of bananas, you happen upon a person who’s quite clearly on their own. One important thing to highlight is that this person might seem cheerful, they might be smiling and they might look happy, but let me promise you that on the inside, they could be in complete despair and feel totally alone like they don’t have anyone at all in the whole world - there’s simply no way of knowing from the outside.
Now, I’m not suggesting that you need to start hunting people down or engineer the means to inject some happiness (although that would be a very admirable undertaking), but suppose you’re presented with the opportunity to share a smile, some comment about an observation or quite literally anything at all that’d make a potentially lonely soul feel noticed. Can you appreciate that because you’re a stranger, it can be like the ‘everyone else in the world’ smiling at them or sharing a joke with them? Can you understand the impact that can have? By doing that, by sharing the power of your stranger, you can make a real difference to people who might currently be locked in battle with an army of demons, and it’s something they can take with them and carry for the rest of the day and maybe longer.
Even if it turns out that your ‘target’ doesn’t fall into the aforementioned group, the fact that we’re forced to include everybody out there on their own only serves to help beak down the barriers, reduce the division and rebuild the connections that we’ve started to lose between people - spreading happiness to more people can only be a good thing! So, remember that through even a very small action or gesture, you can brighten up someone’s entire day. Realise how that goofy joke could make someone feel like they belong and know that just by sharing a smile, you could actually save someone’s life…