talking to strangers

an education from conversation

Feb 03, 2024

Generally, I think you can learn as much about life by talking to strangers than from books, podcasts, or courses. More and more, I’m coming around to the idea that living is an equally valid way to spend my time as reading about living.

~~~

Salim is in his mid 60’s with pepper gray hair, a gooey eastern accent, and a measured walk, like he’s navigating a sea of scattered Legos. He grew up in Bingöl, a small Kurdish community in central Turkey. Salim started work at 11, selling water on the street, helping people carry things to their homes, and clearing tables at coffee shops.

At 15, he moved to Istanbul by himself. Spent his youth-filled years delivering medicine on foot for a pharmacy in the ornate Grand Bazaar. Splitting through the herds of haggling customers, like a vein of water through dirt, by yelling out that he was carrying a wet painting. People got out of his way.

He immigrated to Canada at 20. Married twice. Divorced twice. Hauled freight to the Midwest in a semi-truck, delivered parcels and packages in a van, drove Uber in his 2001 beige Volvo—mostly shuttling drunk students to Dallas on Friday nights for half-priced jager bombs.

The past three weeks, I’ve been living with Salim, among a roster of roommates, in an Airbnb in Austin.

Salim spends mornings reclined on a sand-colored sectional sofa, mesmerized by four-hour videos of wind blowing over an English meadow, or majestic swooping shots of the snow-tipped Swiss Alps, or the creamsicle-colored glow of a fireplace piercing through a murky pine-laden backdrop. Sometimes he scurries around the house plugged into his flimsy Sony over-the-ear headphones, straightening decorative pillows, putting away dishes from the drying rack, and mopping the kitchen floor. Or he sits in the garden reading one of his four Eckhart Tolle books. Salim speaks Kurdish, Turkish, German, Polish, and English. But tucks into the kitchen table after lunch scribbling down long strings of Spanish sentences in his notebook, murmuring a few to get a taste for the words.

He’s had six and a half years of school but seems to understand life in a way many of my university professors failed to. “Stay away from negative thinking,” he tells me, “it bring misery only,”. “Just positive,” he says. “Best life is simple”. “Heaven is here. Life is heaven.”

Salim has a lifetime of stories—lessons embodied in experience and stress-tested against reality—about pockets of the world I never imagined existed1.

From conversations with Salim and roommates, I’ve learned the loneliness of being a truck driver and which three national parks are hidden gems and the harsh winters of Northern Illinois where the wind rains down and the cold slices through your coat. I’ve learned about the ladder of stand-up comedy and the slight difference in temperament between Swedish and Finnish girls and what Turks mean when they say “Put a helmet on”. I’ve learned the value of observing a partner’s relationship with their parents and the decay of the social sciences in universities into “intellectual entertainment” and how strippers take Venmo.

The cliché “Everyone has something to teach you,” felt trite. Until I realized it was true. That’s the thing about clichés: I only find my way back to their truths through experience.

The landscape of strangers is an endless vista of potential to learn things I didn’t know.

Much of learning about life is remembering I’m not the center of the universe and there’s a lot I don’t know.

~~~

In line at Franklin’s, a bustling barbecue restaurant in East Austin, I noticed an older woman standing behind me. Tortoise-shell owl-eyed glasses, a turquoise turtleneck, and an oversized leather handbag. A grandmother, in the storybook sense. I turned back and asked how her day was. She lit up, startled by excitement. Told me she was a first-grade teacher with six children who had lived in the neighborhood for 52 years. And when the hostess announced the wait would be an hour, she offered to drive me across the river to her favorite restaurant. On the way, she showed me the old colonial homes converted to lawyer’s offices. Pointed out the presidential library, the jail, all the recent “disposable” housing. Confessed her sadness from watching the charm of a city get disfigured by the promise of infinite growth.

If I can get people talking, telling stories of their lives, they become so unbelievably interesting I can hardly drag myself away. It’s the barriers that are boring. People are fascinating.

Every time I talk with a stranger, my world becomes a little bigger. My eyes open a little wider. My roots plant a little deeper.

For that brief moment, my toes crease the corners of their shoes and I feel profoundly human.

Thank you

Haley Brengartner

for all your feedback on a *rough* version of this piece.

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👋 what i’ve been up to:

It’s been a whirlwind of a week. After 9+ months of work with Noah on the book launch, Million Dollar Weekend came out Tuesday and climbed to #16 of all books on Amazon. I spent the day at his house in Austin and went to the book launch party at a beautiful lakehouse.
I also got to check out The University of Texas at Austin, which felt like a college from the movies.
On Friday, Noah and I ran a book workshop at The Painted Porch in Bastrop. Afterward, Ryan Holiday gave us a private tour of his office and studio. Insanely cool. Spending time with successful people instills agency and dares me to dream bigger.
I finished The Illiad & Odyssey and started The King James version of The Bible. I’ve devoted the rest of the year to reading The Bible and major works of Christian literature.

✍️ quote i’m pondering:

Francis Crick, who helped discover the structure of DNA, on taking many shots:

"It is amateurs who have one big bright beautiful idea that they can never abandon. Professionals know that they have to produce theory after theory before they are likely to hit the jackpot."

❓ question i’m asking:

What if I allowed myself to love where I am now as much as I suspect I will love the next place I plan to go?

📸 photo of the week:

From Tuesday…

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