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Meeting random people is not random
Are people scary?
I don’t know.. are you?
Here’s my take on it
1.I once spent a 9h train ride having fun, witty conversations with a guy I had just met.We still talk, every now and then.
2. I also spent a lovely day tripping to the Neuschwanstein Castle together with an au pair American girl from the Midwest. (Man, those people are nice!)
3. We took our Japanese guide for dinner after our tour of Osaka, and one year later we were all having dinner again, in Barcelona.
4. A guy pushed by his friends into flirting with me in a club, turned out to be really nice – he was getting married and on a bachelor night out.
We shared wedding planning tips’n tricks and cake suggestions.
Random things happen every day. But you can make your random memorable, because meeting people is fun, and is not scary, and you’ll love it.
So.. Be a Lobster. Or a Pistachio.
Just, you know, get out of the shell.
I absolutely love and wholeheartedly recommend this video of Rabbi Dr. Abraham Twerski.
The stimulus for a lobster to be able to grow, is that it feels uncomfortable. If lobsters had doctors (*or smartphones – my edits*) they would never grow.
How ever else did we manage to get up to this point in life, if not by coming out of our bubble and giving a little bit of ourselves to the world?
It used to be easy..
It was easy when we were kids, you just went up to another kid and asked if they wanted to play.
It was easier when we were teens, because we mostly met people at school.
It was not hard at college and in our first job, because well, those people you see daily eventually become part of the landscape, start to feel familiar..
And there you go: you make some friends, some of them to stick around for life.
Travel ants-in-pants
Yet somehow when you’re travelling, you start thinking this is all of a sudden very different, and waaay harder.
What if I seem too friendly and give the wrong vibes?
What if they notice I’m travelling solo?
What if it’s a bad person?
And this is especially difficult for women, for reasons we’re all too well aware of.. But it’s also not fair !
So go ahead and change your little bit.
The what-ifs which eventually make you sit alone at the bar, scrolling on your FB and Insta feeds, instead of opening up and talking to the fun looking people next to you.
Then you start missing your friends back home.
What you’re really missing instead, is an amazing opportunity to meet your future friends.
Just.. you know, come out of your shell.
The guy who spoke to you while you were waiting in line at Starbucks – chances are he’s probably just a normal human being.
You’ll be amazed by the wonder still left out there in the world. Go grab some for you.
That’s all.