The perfect stranger is affecting, so affecting it seems they can either make your day or completely ruin it. All it takes is one single form of action for a brief moment in time and like currents of electricity we can experience sparks or a short fuse. People we’ve never seen before, we’ve never heard speak before, who we have absolutely no idea about hold the potential to invoke our strongest emotions. An argument with a friend is annoying, an argument with a stranger is infuriating. How is this possible, what is it that gives a stranger such power and by power I mean ‘affect’, emotional affect. I should first make an obvious point a little more obvious and say that we are all strangers to someone, and by talking about their affect on us I am of course also including our ‘strangeness’ to them as well.
A stranger’s power lies in their anonymity. The fact that we don’t know anything about them or what their likely response to things will be makes them unpredictable and uncertain, in other words a bit scary. However, our lack of knowledge about someone is also the reason we are so moved by them when they come forward to help us at the point we need it the most. If we fall in the street and hurt ourselves it’s not until someone rushes over and asks if we’re okay that we suddenly feel the pain of the fall. It is as though someone else’s acknowledgement of our pain enables us to feel it more too. This is very common among children; they cry harder when mum has noticed they’ve been hurt. But when the acknowledging person is a stranger, things get a bit complicated. Pain gives way to embarrassment which in turn gives way to gratitude (for the stranger’s kindness) and gratitude can invoke feelings of shame and indebtedness. Why? Because out of all the people we know and love in the whole world it wasn’t them but a complete unknown person whom we have no relationship with that came to us in our time of need. They helped us not out of friendship or obligation but for nothing really, they helped because they were there and because they could.
So powerful is this act (regardless of whether purely altruistic or not) that it immediately creates a bond between us and the stranger followed by the thought of how can we repay them for what they’ve done, how can we say thanks. Can you imagine then what it must feel like to have a stranger save your life....? Being the helped person is not necessarily a comfortable position to occupy particularly in this modern age of progress and self sufficiency where asking for help or looking like we need it has all sorts of disparaging connotations attached to it. At the end of the day aren’t we meant to help ourselves, to sort out our own problems and show independence in our loves and losses?
Independence in my opinion is overrated. We live in a relational, interconnected and inter-dependent world whether we like it or not. I happen to like it!
The affect that strangers evoke for the most part resides within us. It is our response to them that highlights what they may have activated. Of course they don’t know this; what our buttons are, being strangers and all. But this may help to understand why an argument with a stranger is often so hard to forget, its aftermath lingering on for hours. Take queue jumping for instance, quite possibly the quickest way to unearth a boiling pot of dormant emotions. Road rage is another example, this time more a case of unresolved grievances displaying themselves on the streets and all over the place. In a sense there is no such thing as a total stranger because we all have the potential to make an impression on one another even if it’s only through conflict. But perhaps the most exciting or equally worrying thought about strangers is that we never know which one of them will enter our lives and at the same time leave the unknown and be strangers no more.
Posts
