Unexpected insights from random lunch convos.

My first month of college has been an endless whirl of new faces and snapshot connections. Several conversations during NSOP and beyond led to buoyant friendships, yet a majority ended as trite goodbyes said half-way out the door. All of this led me to wonder: can talking to someone spark genuine connection?

A pair of arbitrary lunch encounters shed some light on my question. The first occurred in line for wraps at Ferris, when after our fifth minute waiting by the fruit stand, the guy in front of me turned around and introduced himself. Cue the NSOP-ish inquiries about major/school/hometown. Cue the one sentence answers disguising pleas for a buffalo chicken wrap. The guy was finishing his masters, so I asked him for advice. That’s when he launched into a passionate sonnet about networking, which was both amusingly Columbian and genuinely revealing about his personal odyssey as a student. An hour and a half later, we bid each other farewell with new ways of seeing the world and each other.

I believe a couple things helped transform our chance convo into concrete understanding:

1) Genuine curiosity

I am inflicted with undiscerning curiosity, the type that led my kid self to stick her finger on rusted nails and fall into ponds. Thus, whenever a stranger strikes up a conversation with me, I’m eager to find out more about who they are. My lunch line acquaintance also shared that he tries to approach every interaction with a posture of humility, excited to learn from the distinct human condition of those he talks to. This ties into my second point:

2) Shared intention

Our matched curiosity reflected our shared goal, which was learning from the other person. Any human interaction involves constant decoding. Beneath surface level words hide tone of voice, meaningful pauses, and an Austen-worthy array of subtle details that could be translated a thousand ways. A shared purpose when conversing helps two people accurately understand one another’s message beyond mere words, and from there build a concrete connection.

It’s convenient when you converse with someone who shares your intention, yet that purpose can also be built in the midst of conversation. Yesterday’s random lunch convo began when I glibly struck up a conversation with the person sitting next to me, who was already halfway through a muffin and staring placidly at the trees outside. As I found out later, he was a combined plan student. Already, he had finished a B.A. at a liberal arts college and found “lifelong friends;” he wasn’t searching for new connections. Yet at the end of an almost hour-long conversation about creativity, DNA folding, and Game of Thrones, he shared that he was glad I had bothered him during lunch. Although we hadn’t started out with the shared purpose of connection, our conversation had somehow brought us to a shared intention, which then sparked mutual appreciation and understanding.

Bothering other people is not for the faint of heart, nor the wise. Yet occasionally, it pays off.

Ferris line via Bwarchives.