Last summer, my flight to Nantucket was diverted to Boston, thanks to fog thick enough to ground half the runway. An older man and I shared an Uber to Hyannis, only to discover we’d both missed the last ferry. The next morning, we bumped into each other again at the dock. By breakfast, with coffee cooling between us and the harbor slowly coming awake, we’d stopped talking like strangers.
When boarding began, I stepped out of line for a moment. By the time I got back, he’d disappeared into the crowd. I looked for him once we were on the ferry but never found him again.
Some people lose each other in airports or on a ferry. My friend Dilshad Ali lost hers somewhere over Ohio. She spent an hour talking with the man beside her on a flight. They wandered into autism and what it means to raise a child the world doesn’t quite know how to accommodate. Then his wife handed him a book to pass the time.
Dilshad picked up her own book. It was mine, “When Islam Is Not a Religion.”
He looked at the cover, said nothing, and somewhere between one page and the next, the conversation quietly came to an end.
If you’ve traveled enough, you’ve probably had a conversation like that. You leave knowing less about what someone does than what keeps them awake at night. Then the cabin doors open, the spell breaks and everyone drifts toward a different gate.
Recently, Vivek Murthy suggested that airplanes should become places of deliberate solitude again. Put away the laptop, read a book, let your mind wander. I agreed with almost all of it, with only one amendment. Sometimes the best use of an empty hour is the stranger beside you.
There is a category in Islamic law for someone traveling — a “son of the road” (Ibn al-sabil). The wayfarer may have wealth waiting at home, but for this stretch of the journey, he cannot reach it. What matters now is his separation from the ordinary web of people and places that would otherwise sustain him. Until he reaches home, the law says he has a claim on the care of others, enough to continue on his way. Once the journey ends, the claim ends, too. The need belonged to the road.
Islamic prophetic teachings say something similar about guests. A host owes hospitality for three days. After that, what remains is generosity freely given rather than expected. The teaching never assumes the guest will stay. It simply recognizes that two lives have overlapped for a little while, and that this, by itself, is enough to ask something of us.
When I wrote recently that we should talk to our seatmates, the responses surprised me. People told stories about conversations that only made sense years later. The stranger who became a colleague. A woman who unexpectedly turned out to know your cousin. The chance encounter that happened again years later in another city. Looking back, these people realized an ordinary flight hadn’t been ordinary after all.
Those stories made me wonder about all the others. For every encounter that circles back years later, dozens more simply disappear into memory. We step off the plane convinced nothing came of them, never knowing what they quietly left with us.
Psychologists Nicholas Epley and Juliana Schroeder have found that people consistently expect they’d rather be left alone on trains and buses. Yet afterward, they report being happier when they instead talked to the stranger beside them.
One reader pushed back when I encouraged people to talk to their seatmates. Strangers don’t choose where they sit on an airplane, he reminded me, and they can’t easily leave if a conversation becomes unwelcome. I think that’s a fair caution. No one is entitled to another person’s attention. A conversation should always remain an invitation.
Even so, I suspect some of our hesitation comes from somewhere else. We want certainty before we say hello. We’d like to know, before we open ourselves to another person, that the hour won’t be uncomfortable or wasted.
Life rarely offers that kind of certainty. In this case, all you know is that, for a little while, this person has been placed in your care.
It’s tempting to wonder whether certain people were meant to enter our lives. The older teachings ask a different question: Now that they have, how will you receive them?
I still think about breakfast in Hyannis, the salt air drifting across the dock as strangers became companions for a morning. I also sometimes think about the conversation Dilshad had over Ohio that ended when a man lowered his eyes to the cover of a book and let the moment pass.
By the time the ferry docked or the plane touched down, each of those relationships had already run its course. Like the traveler or the guest, they belonged to us only for the length of the journey. Perhaps that is precisely why they deserved our attention while they were there.
The next time you’re tempted to put on your headphones, you might instead begin with a question.