Escaping the rain, you step into a shop doorway only to discover that someone else has had the same idea. You make space for each other and stand watching the pavement disappear beneath the downpour.
After a while, they glance at you and say, “I think we live here now.”
You laugh, and the wait feels different. A moment ago, you were each occupied with getting somewhere else. Now you are sharing the absurdity of being held hostage by the weather, and neither of you seems quite so stranded.
I find something lovely in these small encounters. They arrive in the middle of a day that already has plenty going on, with someone we might otherwise have passed without a second glance. We have made no arrangements to be available to each other. Yet here we are.
We spend a great deal of time talking about connection as something we need to create. Sometimes that is useful work. But it can begin to sound like another task requiring effort, with the faint possibility that we are falling behind at being human.
Then someone makes a ridiculous remark in a doorway, and we remember that we can be reached.
Very little information has passed between us. We know nothing about the other person’s life beyond their current objection to getting soaked. Yet something of them has become present to us, and our own experience has made space for theirs.
Perhaps that is part of what makes unexpected connection feel so welcome. For a moment, the day opens beyond our private concerns. Another person is here with us, experiencing this small interruption from their own side of it.
We may never see them again. The rain eases and we go our separate ways, carrying an easier feeling into whatever comes next. The encounter has been brief, but the warmth can travel further than the conversation.
I think there is something worth noticing there. Our plans take up so much of our attention that an unplanned moment can feel like an intrusion. Occasionally, it is the moment that brings us back into the life already happening around us.
And to think we were only trying to stay dry.