It’s been more than a year and a half now since I last met a stranger. The idea of newness in your life. What happens to a mind when it’s deprived of the newness around it? Isn’t it the new, the strange, the unknown that helps our mind climb out of its despair, out of its rigid, decaying pit of pity? The element of surprise, of things beyond our calculations - it is in these moments that our internal horizons widen to some extent. Realities so utterly strange and unknown bring us comfort and peace in our knowingness. Through our differences, the lens of equality focuses and connects what couldn’t be further apart. In the short but humble moments of unwilling touch on the subway, or a change of staff at your local bakery, we transcend into an understanding of the ultimate. Interplay, interchange, and intersections of human qualities are reacquainting us with life in its purest form.

We walk and walk and walk all our lives, making choices, speaking our truth, and hugging syllables. It was never about where we walk to, but rather who we could possibly walk alongside. It is in the moment of strangeness itself unfolding that we become part of the magic itself. The past traverses into the experienced, being translated by chemicals into lived reality, and the ever- present could never be any more present. There is an infinite amount of smells, colors, skin tones, smiles, and voices; they will infiltrate you into invisibility.

It is through us being the stranger in someone else’s reality that we have the power to change, to grip reality by the ankles and make it trip. We are the reason other people choose to stay alive in this sandbox of children never growing up. It is in my actions and yours that we enable love to flood our veins;

it is us being strange that allows peace a chance. All our lives we walk, our walls thinning around the drenching pool of knowledge we want to absorb.

Sometimes we also sit, allowing the wet truth to form dew on our skin. Like a hunting animal, we wait for nature to lick the dew from our surface and integrate our lived experience into the bark of a newborn tree.

You see, it has always been the present in which the strange, the unknown, takes place, and it is our bravery and humanity that allow us to be imperfect.

Only by being soft enough to understand our flaws do we allow the integration of something new into our DNA.

We are prey to other people; we are savages in the culture of planet Earth.

Obviously, there is a lot of responsibility in being the stranger in someone else’s dream of life. It is through us that the message of the divine arrives in someone else’s biochemical network of neurotransmitters.

We disrupt the perfect harmony of flaw and narcissism. We take a bath in someone else’s sea and wash our minds with the soap of responsibility.

Everyone has to swim for the first time in their life, but most of us never forget their fear of the blue. Suddenly, being a stranger means being the comfort someone can’t find within themselves. It is the rhythm of existence rotating around our spirit. All our lives we walk, all our lives we look for truth around us in others, forgetting that it is us - the element of surprise in other people’s lives.