## Metadata - Author: [[Kio Stark ]] - Full Title: When Strangers Meet - Category: #books ## Highlights - Talking to people I’ve never met is my adventure. It’s my joy, my rebellion, my liberation. It is how I live. Here’s why. When you talk with strangers, you make beautiful and surprising interruptions in the expected narrative of your daily life. You shift perspective. You form momentary, meaningful connections. You find questions whose answers you thought you knew. You reject the ideas that make us so suspicious of each other. ([Location 49](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0176M3QXW&location=49)) - We have to navigate that world safely somehow. We can make these choices with attention and grace. If we don’t, we will find ourselves in a one-dimensional world, deprived of honest human connections and interruptions that awaken us. ([Location 135](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0176M3QXW&location=135)) - Ritualistic things we say in passing that we don’t really mean much by, like “How are you?,” “Good morning,” “Nice day, isn’t it?,” “Take it easy,” “How you feelin’?,” “Hi, mami,” “Cómo estás?,” these phrases are known to linguists as phatic communication. ([Location 168](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0176M3QXW&location=168)) - Just because someone is near you, or interacting with you by necessity, that doesn’t mean you owe them access to your inner life. We have contradictory desires. We want to be seen and we want not to be seen. We want to be known and we want not to be known. In every interaction we have, the thickness or thinness of that boundary is negotiated over and over. We close and we open, open and close. ([Location 197](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0176M3QXW&location=197)) - In flirting, whether you’re aware of it or not, you attempt to coordinate your body this way in an effort to be liked. In rejecting an overture, you make sure your body isn’t in sync to be clear that you’re not interested. Experiments have borne out that mimicry communicates (or can be manipulated to communicate) our desired social distance in an interaction. Greater mimicry tells of our desire for greater closeness and vice versa. Researchers call these mimicked bodily movements and rhythms, and synchronized gestures and voices, “embodied rapport.” ([Location 263](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0176M3QXW&location=263))