Last summer, my flight to Nantucket was diverted to Boston, fog thick enough to ground half the runway. An older man and I shared an Uber to Hyannis, only to discover we’d both missed the last ferry. We found separate hotels. The next morning we bumped into each other again at the dock. By breakfast, with coffee cooling between us and the harbor slowly coming awake, we’d stopped talking like strangers.
When boarding began, I stepped out of line for a moment. By the time I got back, he’d disappeared into the crowd. I looked for him once we were on the ferry but never found him again.
Some people lose each other in airports.
I lost mine on a ferry.
My friend Dilshad Ali lost hers somewhere over Ohio. She spent an hour talking with the man beside her on a flight. They wandered into autism and what it means to raise a child the world doesn’t quite know how to accommodate. Then his wife handed him a book to pass the time.
Dilshad picked up her own book: When Islam Is Not a Religion.
He looked at the cover, said nothing, and somewhere between one page and the next, the conversation quietly came to an end.
If you’ve traveled enough, you’ve probably had a conversation like that. You leave knowing less about what someone does than what keeps them awake at night. Then the cabin doors open, the spell breaks, and everyone drifts toward a different gate.
Recently, Vivek Murthy suggested that airplanes and other liminal spaces should become places of deliberate solitude or connection again. Put away the laptop, read a book, let your mind wander. Or notice the stranger beside you. Sometimes the best use of an empty hour is another human being.
There is a category in Islamic law for someone like this. Ibn al-sabil, the son of the road. For this stretch of the journey, the wayfarer has been separated from the ordinary web of people and places that would otherwise sustain him. Because of that separation, he acquires a claim on the care of others—enough to see him safely home. Once he arrives, the claim disappears. The need belonged to the road.
The Prophetic teachings say something similar about guests. A host owes hospitality for three days. After that, what remains is generosity freely given rather than expected. The teaching never assumes the guest will stay. It simply recognizes that two lives have overlapped for a little while, and that this, by itself, is enough to ask something of us.
When I wrote recently that we should talk to our seatmates, the responses surprised me. People told stories about conversations that only made sense years later. The stranger who became a colleague. The woman who unexpectedly turned out to know your cousin. The chance encounter that returned years later in another city. Looking back, they realized an ordinary flight hadn’t been ordinary after all.
Those stories pointed, almost by contrast, to all the others. For every encounter that circles back years later, there must be dozens that simply disappear into memory. We step off the plane convinced nothing came of the encounter, never knowing what, if anything, it quietly left behind.
Psychologists Nicholas Epley and Juliana Schroeder have found that people consistently expect they’d rather be left alone on trains and buses. Afterwards, they report being happier when they talked to the stranger beside them instead.
One reader pushed back when I encouraged people to talk to their seatmates. Strangers don’t choose where they sit on an airplane, he reminded me, and they can’t easily leave if a conversation becomes unwelcome. I think that’s a fair caution. I’ve spent a flight nodding politely while the man beside me recounted his life after becoming a born-again Christian, pausing every few minutes to ask whether I’d ever considered following the same path. By the time he was lamenting how all the wrong people were taking over the country, I found myself watching the little airplane creep across the seatback map, willing it to move faster.
The problem wasn’t that we disagreed. The problem was that I had nowhere to take the conversation except where he wanted it to go. No one is entitled to another person’s attention. A conversation should always remain an invitation.
Even so, I suspect some of our hesitation comes from somewhere else. We want certainty before we say hello. We’d like to know, before we open ourselves to another person, that the hour won’t be wasted.
Life rarely offers that kind of certainty.
The traveler doesn’t arrive with a promise that he’ll become part of your life. The guest doesn’t come with any assurance of what comes next. All you know is that, for a little while, this person has been placed in your care.
It’s tempting to wonder whether certain people were meant to enter our lives. The older teachings ask a different question: Now that they have, how will you receive them?
I still think about breakfast in Hyannis, the salt air drifting across the dock as strangers became companions for a morning. Sometimes I think about the conversation Dilshad had over Ohio that ended when a man lowered his eyes to the cover of a book and let the moment pass.
Breakfast ended. The ferry docked. The plane landed.
Like the traveler, like the guest, they belonged to us only for the length of the journey.