My journey of greeting strangers

I’ve held onto a garbled memory of a passage in the first few pages of Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for the few decades since I read it:

Roads free of drive-ins and billboards are better, roads where groves and meadows and orchards and lawns come almost to the shoulder, where kids wave to you when you ride by, where people look from their porches to see who it is, where when you stop to ask directions or information the answer tends to be longer than you want rather than short, where people ask where you’re from and how long you’ve been riding.

My garbling amounted to recalling this as being much more direct and philosophical than it ended up being. Maybe because I grew up in the countryside of Virginia I wanted to be one of those kids that waved at the motorcycle as it flew by. Sadly I’ve had very little time to sit on the porch and wave at the passers-by, but I’ve endeavored to practice this habit of greeting by saying “howdy” to folks I see walking around the community.

This seemed like a perfectly normal thing, even when I moved to the city of Richmond VA. Occasionally someone would have headphones on and I’d skip it, but generally folks greeted each other. This seemed very normal. Eventually I settled on “howdy” as my preferred greeting since it was a bit old school and avoided any confusion over whether it was still morning or not. Years pass in the Commonwealth of Virginia and I felt no concern over this habit.

Then I moved to California. For a while, I was still perfectly happy with this habit. I started walking more after my GP gave me grief over my bulging tummy. I had great times hiking with several urban hiking meetup groups in LA. Even when I was walking by myself most folks were friendly, despite LA definitely being considered a “big city”. LA is an amazingly nice city from a pedestrian perspective. Again, years pass and I think all is well.

Then I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area. Now I was in a much different cultural milieu. Some aspects of this were readily apparent. Such as, my oft-repeated phrase: “To find a good restaurant in San Francisco you have to join a secret society and go down a smelly alley.” I haven’t gotten any grief about my perspective from the locals.

Other aspects of Bay Area culture took longer to pick up, such as not greeting people on the trails. Once I noticed this tendency, it really bothered me. It became my personal and presumptive quest to bring enlightened civilization to the Bay Area by encouraging more folks to greet each other as they pass by. I soothe myself by believing that I may have been a positive influence on a handful of hikers in Martinez. The lack of greeting thing also became one of my recurring topics when talking to the locals. One of the locals even tracked me down weeks after hearing my griping to say that they had thought about it for a while and they definitely felt like not greeting people was the norm in the Bay Area. I’m still amazed.

For the last few years I’ve had the joy of hiking around California’s Central Coast. You’ve probably heard about Pismo Beach or San Luis Obispo. If you’ve never been, I highly recommend it. It is a lovely area. And most importantly for this story, these folks are happy to say “hi” on the trail to each other. I was honestly shocked to find this again in California. I had almost forgotten about how nice the folks in LA were.

I struggle to put into words how profound a breath of fresh air this was for me. I still vividly remember the first time someone started talking to me in the line in a produce market. The Avila Valley Barn is also a zoo, ice cream stand, toy store, and epic Instagram backdrop, but stick with the produce market aspect for a few more seconds. I was so pleasantly shocked that somebody casually struck up conversation with someone else in line in the market. It felt like something that could have been in a country store in Virginia.

There’s science to back this up

While researching this article I was pleasantly surprised to find this NPR article “Why saying hello to strangers can be good for you”. They start with

[…] as we reported in a story we published three years ago: Why a stranger’s hello can do more than just brighten your day.

Correspondent Rhitu Chatterjee reported on studies showing that simply chatting with strangers has a lasting impact: It can make the participants happy. Even smiling and waving hello to a vendor you see regularly can boost your spirits, says psychologist Gillian Sandstrom, who delved into the benefits of social ties after her own uplifting exchanges with a hot dog seller during a time when she was feeling really isolated.

The article struck a chord with readers, who shared their own stories of random encounters.

I love it when there’s science to underpin my philosophy. It is also amazing timing for me to have finally gotten around to writing about this.

The Bay isn’t that bad

I understand that some Bay Area residents will be offended by my criticism. I’m not trying to please everybody, but I should earnestly acknowledge that there are a significant number of friendly outgoing people in the Bay Area who are happy to greet you when you’re out and about. There are also lots of great trails that go for miles without dealing with any vehicles. And some of our favorite restaurants, farmer’s markets, bakeries and more.

Not a silver bullet

Greeting others is no silver bullet. It won’t change your life instantly. But greeting others can definitely be part of how we choose to lead our lives. It can be part of our lives that makes it easier to enjoy our time on this Earth. I’m sure you can come up with plenty of excuses for not living this way. I’m sure you’re busy. I would not be surprised if you’re scared of strangers. I respect all of those feelings and I still hope you’ll give it a try. You might be the next one to be surprised.

Meta

  • The first draft of this article was written without AI assistance. I utilized AI and human reviews for polishing it.
  • I wrote this a few days ago, but I’m publishing it today so that I won’t be skipping July for getting something added to my blog.
  • I completely ignored my backlog of content ideas to share something that has been on my mind.