From a young age, many people are told not to interact with strangers. I agree that this advice has some validity behind it. This is so people learn early on to be safe and not to just trust anyone. However, as a social individual, I find this advice to be conflicting. Many of the people who a person labels as their friends were once strangers in the past. Although sometimes there are strangers who are not meant to be life long friends but rather confidants who make the other person learn a few valuable lessons during a specific moment in their life.

I recently had an experience like this during one weekend afternoon. It was after I finished working my campus job and went to a store in my neighborhood to go shopping. As I was in the store, one of the items I had to get was a birthday card for a friend. After being in the card aisle for a bit, I was approached by an older woman who looked like she was about in her mid-80s.

This woman asked me if I could help her find a birthday card for her daughter in law. This was because she could not read the cards due to her diminishing eyesight. So, without a hesitation, I said sure. Although as we were looking for the types of cards she could choose from, this woman started to confide in me about her personal life. Topics such as her family, her daily health situations and her spouse's uncertain state of health were discussed.

So I continued to make conversation with her even after we could not find the specific birthday card she was looking to buy for her daughter in law. However, I knew she needed someone to confide in so I stayed and I listened. I even tried my best to help her out with any advice that I had regarding her situations. Afterwords, I could sense that this lady felt calmer. She told me she really appreciated my conversation and the compassion that I had. She was glad that I as a young person took some time out of my day to listen to her talk about her personal life situations.

Looking back at this random moment I recently had with a stranger made me appreciate the way that I was raised. I was taught to listen to and to respect my elders — even if they are strangers. It made me also wonder why there are people who choose to not listen to people who genuinely need someone to confide in for just a moment. Then I thought what if someone else in my age group would have also been as understanding if they had experience in this same situation. Unfortunately, I believe that several people would not have given this older woman the time of day to confide in them since maybe they just did not want to be bothered by something or someone that was not directly affecting them.

Overall, this made me think that even in a world where there are not many people that are willing to listen to a stranger anymore some people are. I know there are several others that have similar values as I do. But I wish there were more people who could be compassionate to the elderly in general because these are the majority of individuals who tend to have very few people left in their lives to confide in.