Give Humanity More Wiggle Room
What happens when you become more aware of the stories you tell yourself about strangers?
This is the second installment of a three-part series about feeling whatever we feel as we reflect on our shared humanity.
Give Humanity More Wiggle Room
Last week, we explored what happens when we imagine the well-being of people who are easy to love. Friends, family members, mentors, pets, and others whose happiness feels naturally important to us. One of the things I suggested was paying attention to whatever emotional responses arise, rather than treating warm feelings as the goal of the exercise.
This week, I’d like to shift our attention to a different category of people: strangers.
I don’t know what goes on inside most people. That sounds obvious, but I forget it constantly. I’m fascinated by what I can’t know about what makes people tick, and by how little it takes for me to convince myself that I like, dislike, or understand a person I don’t know.
I can spend thirty seconds observing someone in a grocery store, airport, waiting room, or coffee shop and come away with surprisingly strong impressions. I notice how they’re dressed. I catch a fragment of a conversation. I observe an interaction with a cashier or customer service worker. Before long, I find myself dropping them into a bucket of other people they remind me of.
One of the many uncomfortable takeaways from my first silent meditation retreat was how quickly I divided the other meditators into three categories: people I liked, people I had some aversion to, and people I barely noticed. Keep in mind that I made these assignments over several days of not talking at all, mostly sitting in silence together or watching each other walk slowly back and forth across the lawn like people auditioning for a zombie movie or to be welcomed into a cult. What really blew my mind was how much resorting I had to do when we started talking again.
The remarkable thing isn’t that this happens. The remarkable thing is how automatically it happens without our tracking most of it. We’re born storytellers. We’re on the lookout for heroes, villains, and people who don’t warrant our attention at all. We want to understand things we can’t possibly know.
Presented with incomplete information, we fill in the blanks. Sometimes we do this generously. We imagine loving families, meaningful work, interesting hobbies, loyal friends, and personal struggles being navigated with courage.
At other times, we fill in the blanks less generously. We assume selfishness. Carelessness. Entitlement. Ignorance.
The details vary, but the process is remarkably similar. The less information we have, the more imagination we rely on to feel like we know.
One of the reasons I enjoy exercises based on imagining another person’s well-being is that they expose this tendency so clearly.
Try this out in the world without anyone knowing you’re doing it:
Pick a person at random.
Remind yourself that deep down this person wants to be safe, happy, healthy, and comfortable.
Imagine the person thriving. Not because they’ve earned it. Not because you approve of every decision they’ve ever made. Just because they’re human.
If possible, temporarily forego policing the person’s appearance and observable behaviors. Let them be different from you, and maybe even shoot for a version of a happy life that doesn’t resemble yours.
Remember that deep down you also want. General safety and security. Good health. Connection to other people. A sense of purpose. A little less stress. A little more ease.
Notice what happens next. Feel whatever emotional reactions this stirs up for a minute.
If you’re like me, almost immediately, your mind begins generating all sorts of details you don’t have access to. Things about their history, the people in their lives, their job, their mood today, their overall energy level, their baseline honesty or kindness, and their core personality.
The point isn’t that we shouldn’t be curious about strangers. To me, the value of the exercise lies in revealing how much of our experience of other people is shaped by our own imagination. We rarely encounter another person’s full humanity. We encounter fragments and instinctively construct stories around them.
This doesn’t mean our stories are always completely wrong. It just means they’re incomplete. When I’m right, it’s still based on guesswork and quick assumptions.
There is something potentially liberating about recognizing how often we reduce people to fit the categories we’ve developed throughout our lives. The more I practice this exercise, the less interested I become in deciding who deserves basic well-being and the more interested I become in noticing the assumptions I’m carrying around about other people.
Some assumptions create closeness. Others create distance. Many operate completely outside of awareness. What I find most useful isn’t replacing negative stories with positive ones. It’s creating a little more space around all of them.
A little more uncertainty. A little more curiosity. A little more wiggle room.
The goal isn’t to become naïve. It’s to unhook our behavior from the snap judgments we mistake for reality.
The goal is to remember how little information we usually work with to simplify life’s complexity — especially the social aspects of our daily lives.
When we do that, it becomes easier to recognize the humanity we share with people whose lives intersect only briefly with our own. We might start to make room for nuance and even contradictions that aren’t up to us to resolve. We might even notice that the narratives we automatically project onto others reveal more about ourselves than about the strangers.
Here are a few tips I’ve found helpful when I practice this one.
Save the Drama for Your Mama
Imagining the well-being of strangers can feel much less personal and therefore less intense than imagining the well-being of the other categories of people used in this heart practice. Remember to practice letting emotional neutrality be a valid response.
The Benefit of Ignorance
One thing that can make loving-kindness difficult is confusing being able to recognize our shared humanity with condoning specific behaviors or opinions that conflict with our own values. When you find it easier to imagine the well-being of some strangers, could it be at least partly about not knowing enough about them? This also points to something about more difficult people — and often ourselves: we know too much. When you find it more difficult, the stranger probably belongs in the category with challenging people.
Gathering Clues from Strangers
It can be easy to imagine the well-being of people we know the least about. We let them laugh. We give them families. We decorate their homes. Consider how effortlessly we fill in such details. Could we do the same when it comes to the people who are very familiar to us, but we have a difficult time distinguishing fiction from fact when our feelings are stronger, and their lives overlap more directly with our own?
This week’s exercise explores these possibilities.
What happens when you ease up on assuming you already know who someone is and become curious about the many ways their humanity might be expressed in ways that are unobservable by you? Could becoming more aware of the storytelling you do undermine the degree to which you rely on it by default?
Exercise
This exercise lets you watch your imagination at work when you consider the well-being of people you don’t know.
Circumstances for learning this attention exercise
Shopping in a grocery store
Waiting in a long, slow line
Driving on the highway
Navigating air travel
