“I know this is a little odd,” I said, forcing a smile and clutching my motorcycle helmet as I struck up a conversation with the man outside the gas station. “But I’m travelling by motorcycle across the United States with my family, and I’m trying to ask as many people as I can, What’s something good in your life lately?”

It was hard to read the expression on the leather-clad stranger’s lips, partly because they were concealed behind a beard thick enough to house several songbirds. He eyed my white helmet as one hand shifted to the tank of his bike. His was a Harley. If he was like most bikers I knew, he had already absorbed the make, model, and age of my BMW from across the parking lot. The silence lasted long enough for me to begin to doubt. Would he dismiss me for our many differences, not least of these the historic rivalry between our cycle brands?

He nodded slightly, and a corner of his mouth rose into the beginning of a smile. “Well, I’ll tell you what’s good—any day it doesn’t rain, am I right?”

“Absolutely,” I responded eagerly, thrilled that my first attempt to converse with a stranger on this trip was gaining traction. “We raced to beat that wall of clouds yesterday but still got drenched.”

He bobbed his head in sympathy. “First four days up from Texas, rained every day.” Suddenly we were members of the same tribe—travellers on two wheels, vulnerable to wind and rain, chasing new places and friendly encounters. “Name’s Diaz.” He pulled off a glove and extended a hand to shake. “Where you coming from?”

Ten minutes later he was giving me a tour of his luggage arrangement, including the Styrofoam cooler precariously bungeed to his seat. My husband, twenty-three-year-old daughter, and twenty-one-year-old son started honking their bikes impatiently. It was harder to get Diaz to stop talking than it had been to get him to start. We posed for a selfie, and he sent me on my way with a sticker to match one of the dozens decorating his own bike.

When my family decided to spend a month motorcycling across the western United States, I knew this would become my next best excuse to talk to strangers. I am an anthropologist by training, so talking to strangers is my jam. Research methods in my discipline are all about interviewing and hanging out with people, and most often those people start out seeming like an “other”—different in culture, language, or identity.

But inviting people into a research interview is not the same as striking up a conversation during chance encounters in everyday life. This trip provided the perfect opportunity to put my listening skills to the test and see what difference it could make to pay attention to the strangers along our way.

When people hear that my family rides motorcycles, they usually offer one (or both) of two responses: (1) That’s so cool. (2) Let me tell you about someone who died on a motorcycle.

A lot goes into a motorcycle trip for four people. Four sets of bikes, protective coats, pants, gloves, boots, and helmets are not cheap. Then there’s the risk. If one of us falls, will it be worth it? This question always points me to a far wider question: What ultimately is worth it in this whole journey of life? What deserves our money and time? When the road ends, what risks will we regret, and what will have been worth the risk?

There are many ways we could have justified a motorcycle trip, like the confidence and dependence built through shared challenges or the underappreciated view of the country through back roads and small towns. There are the hours of uninterrupted meditation, the attentiveness and wonder, and the deepening relationships with each other. For our family, all those reasons would have been enough to say yes to the trip. But knowing what I know about human nature, I was also motivated by another reason.

Something special happens when you step off a motorcycle: Strangers talk to you. I’m not sure what it is about motorcycling—the vulnerability, the oddity, the socially ascribed coolness, or perhaps the very nearness to death—that draws strangers into conversations. But I knew this to be true from the previous several hundred conversations with strangers I’d found myself stumbling into while carrying a bike helmet. And I also knew that those conversations—not just time with family—contribute to what matters most in life.

Sociologist Hartmut Rosa makes the case that humans ultimately crave “resonance”—the mutual and living sense that we matter to the social, material, and spiritual world around us. We long to “experience constitutive moments of resonance in which our wire to the world begins to vibrate intensely, in which our relationship to the world begins to breathe.”

Resonance is another word to describe what we have long known we need: good relationships, not only with life-long friends but in the small, everyday connections called weak ties. As many of us discovered while sheltering in place during the Covid-19 pandemic, minute interactions with neighbours at the mailbox and with supermarket shelf stockers matter. Our psychological well-being and our trust in society as a whole suffer when we treat strangers as merely strangers.

Psychologists Nicholas Epley and Juliana Schroeder conducted experiments in which they asked people to strike up a conversation with a stranger in a public space. Before the conversations, they asked participants to predict how it would feel. Participants predicted that they would enjoy the conversation significantly less than sitting in silence and that fewer than half of the people they approached would want to talk with them.

But Epley and Schroeder found that those pessimistic predictions are entirely ungrounded. After striking up a conversation, every single participant in their study, whether extrovert or introvert, reported having a positive impression of the strangers they met. Every person enjoyed the experience. And across multiple studies of this sort, every stranger approached by a participant was happy to talk. In other words, strangers will like you more than you expect.

Leaving Rapid City, South Dakota, we stopped in a hardware store to purchase a replacement screw for my son’s bike. When I prepared to pay, my jaw dropped—no credit card. I could picture it immediately: Four hours earlier, I had set the card atop a gas station pump on the opposite side of the city.

My husband called the gas station. Did they have my card? No. But a customer had found it and left a phone number to call.

We were furious. Who lets a random stranger at a gas station take home the credit card they found? What kind of ransom would this stranger ask for, and how much had they already purchased on my card? My husband raced to cancel the card while I called the stranger’s number.

“I’m so glad you called!” The young man who answered the phone sounded genuine. “My girlfriend and I have been searching social media to figure out how to contact you. I used to work in a gas station and I know how people just throw away cards that get left behind, so I didn’t want that to happen to you. How can I come find you?”

Ten minutes later, the young couple drove up to the hardware store, handed me the card, and refused to let me give them as much as a can of soda in gratitude. “Just glad we could help,” they said with a grin as they drove off.

Strangers not only like you—they actually want to help you.  

We put this to the test in Yellowstone National Park when we parked our bikes to hike for a few days in the backcountry. Our route began twenty-five miles from the parking lot, so we budgeted time to hitchhike.

By the time I had rearranged my belongings from bike pannier to backpack, my husband had already flagged down a pickup truck. Doug, Karen, and their tiny dog, Smash, eyed the four adults and tall backpacks skeptically.

“You think you could ride in the back?” Doug suggested tentatively. None of us could confirm whether it was legal, but nobody opposed. They weren’t headed to our trailhead but offered to take us halfway. It was beginning to rain, so we wrapped ourselves in raincoats and tarps as we climbed in. Soon we were giggling as we bounced along, grateful for our good fortune to find a lift so soon.

When we reached their turnoff point, I began climbing out of the truck, expecting to hike an extra three miles to the trailhead. But Doug and Karen opened their doors and insisted on taking us the rest of the way—driving a family of giddy hitchhikers had made their day. We then traded phone numbers so we could share photos of our travels.

My collection of gifts from people we met along the way grew: the sticker from Diaz, the ride from Karen and Doug, trail recommendations, spare shorts, a favourite lipstick colour recommendation from an elderly woman.

I attended college in an era when Christians were trained to “evangelize” strangers in fifteen minutes or less with an eight-page booklet. For many Christians trained in those methods, the awkward and transactional experiences drove us to an opposite extreme. We liked to think of ourselves as building safe cocoons of relational trust prior to conversations about faith. That usually meant, though, that we stopped talking about faith altogether beyond our safe cliques of church buddies.

While I do not miss the feeling of tracking gospel acceptances like trophies or starting conversations with questions of eternal damnation, I wonder if, in the pendulum shift toward relational evangelism, the church lost something crucial. We forgot that chance encounters also go deep.

In an Idaho park where my family stopped for lunch, I greeted a man in the pickup next to our bikes. Falling back on my usual question, I asked, “What’s good in your life lately?”

“Well, I had a horse die,” he began. He was sitting in the driver’s seat with one elbow out the window, and he had been idling his engine for as long as it took us to eat our tuna and tortillas. “I mean, that’s not a good thing, though,” he backpedalled, sounding disappointed in himself for getting one more thing wrong. I offered some encouragement: “Sounds like a big deal.”

Tony said he had $25,000 invested in that horse. A guy who was boarding it gave it grain with a parasite in it. “I had three horses and I’d sold two, so that was my only horse. The guy isn’t taking responsibility, so it’s been a lot to deal with. Was just getting to the age where it was a good horse.”

I nodded along, having no idea how a person spends that much on a horse or what qualifies a horse as good.

Then Tony cut a sharp turn in the conversation. “I have faith in Jesus Christ, and all the signs point toward Jesus coming back soon now.” Instinctively, I shifted my eye contact toward the horizon in an attempt to avoid a debate about eschatology while signalling that he could keep talking.

But then he shrugged to indicate he wasn’t up for any debates either. “Well, people have been talking about signs for a long time. Anyway, what’s good in my life? Knowing about Jesus.” I imagined telling my college ministry leaders this new tip for spiritual conversations with strangers: Listen all the way through the dead horse stories.

Tony wasn’t the only one who took a conversation in a spiritual direction. When we stopped at an RV campground in Providence, Utah, to check our weather app, a man with a crinkled face and grey beard meandered out of an RV toward us. When he offered a listen on his weather radio, I noticed he spoke with long pauses between phrases, reminding me of stroke survivors I’ve known. He said little but seemed grateful to linger in our presence. As my husband mapped out our options, my son took the moment to ask my usual question: What’s good in your life lately? He mirrored the man’s speed, gifting him patient attention.

“That’s exactly what I’ve been trying to figure out.” A long pause. I echoed back, “That’s exactly what we’re all trying to figure out.”

He received this as permission to keep searching for words. “I’ve had a lot of bad things happen to me.” Each word came with effort as he stared into the middle distance. “But God is my co-pilot.” Another silence. “So I’m okay.” The wrinkles around his eyes deepened into a smile.

To listen to a story is to open a space for someone to re-narrate life. We can approach story listening with the sacred tenderness with which we walk into hospital rooms. Healings, deaths, and new births all happen here.

Mark Yaconelli, founder of the Hearth storytelling community, writes that “the power of stories to free us, whether religious or secular, depends on the integrity and compassion of the tellers and the openness of listeners.” He quotes the Nigerian author Ben Okri to explain how merely being heard can change the course of our lives: “We live stories that either give our lives meaning or negate it with meaninglessness. If we change the stories we live by, quite possibly, we change our lives.”

Re-narration brings a joy that spreads over both speaker and listener. When a young man named Jacob struck up a conversation with me in Boulder, I could sense his disappointment in his current ride. “How does your bike handle the dirt?” he asked, comparing the mud splatters on my adventure-style bike to his heavy road bike. He said he used to ride a dirt bike but ran out of money to keep it. “But this one”—he gestured to the bike he had just parked—“still gets me places. And besides,” he added, “I can take my chihuahua on this one.” He said he sewed a mesh bag for his dog to ride in front. “He likes to ride standing up.”

The image of Jacob making the most of his tight budget with his chihuahua barrelling down a highway made my day.

Passing through towns with abandoned school buildings, gas stations too run down to house a functioning restroom, four-hour driving stretches without a grocery store, and population signs under fifty residents, I developed a new appreciation for the fears facing voters in these states.

In one city, I stopped to compliment a man playing guitar in a park. “I like to come out here to sing goodness into this place,” he told me. He said he also had a YouTube channel, and I noticed that the description of what he posted there plus the writing on his T-shirt added up to someone at the far opposite end of the political spectrum from myself.

I chose to focus on the song sheet on the bench beside us—a praise song I’ve known for decades. “That’s a good one,” I offered.

“Sure is,” he returned. “I’m trying to live more by the Spirit. Imagine that. Christians living by the Spirit.” He waved to a group of passing teenagers and shouted, “Let’s go!” The boys didn’t seem to know him, but they waved back a cheerful, “Hey, man!” I didn’t have to agree with his political views to leave inspired by a fellow human trying to live by the Spirit of God.

The conversation was a stark reminder of how quickly we categorize political “others.” In her book I Never Thought of It That Way, Braver Angels senior fellow Mónica Guzmán points out that we tend to vastly overestimate how much people from across political divides disagree with and dislike us. She cites one 2020 study that found both Democrats and Republicans each think “the other side despises them about twice as much as they actually do.”

Our misjudging of political others is a part of our wider tendency to misconstrue anyone we imagine in a category of “other.” We tend toward the assumption that people in our own group are all unique and complex whereas people in other groups are all pretty much the same. When we talk with strangers, though, we discover how heterogeneous they are.

Initiating conversations that will go deep enough to reveal the wonderful diversity of the strangers around us doesn’t have to be difficult. Motorcycles offer one conversation opener, but there are many more.

In a course I developed called Understanding People, I teach students strategies to meet and listen well to the people around them. We practice striking up conversations at the start of every class, and students conduct a series of activities calling for increasing social bravery, from broaching a difficult topic with a roommate to asking a stranger about death.

Some techniques I teach come from my own trial and error, but many come from other experts. We learn from Joe Keohane’s book The Power of Strangers: The Benefits of Connecting in a Suspicious World; sociologist Annette Lareau’s practical guide Listening to People; and talks by Brandon Stanton, the writer and photographer behind the viral Humans of New York storytelling project. Here are a few favourite tips.

Pre-frame. In my conversation with Diaz, I named the awkwardness at the start. “I know this is a little odd, but . . .” By naming the context, you can set people at ease by demonstrating that you know the social norms but you’re going to break them anyway. Try, for example, “I don’t usually talk to people in airport lounges, but . . .”

Break the script. In most situations, small-talk niceties like “How are you?” are inevitable, and, in fact, these rituals are valuable for putting people at ease. But answering on autopilot is often a dead end. Instead, practice surprising responses. How are you? Dismal. Ebullient. My horse died.

Find your favourite questions. Nobody needs to know that you’ve used the same conversation starter a dozen times. If it works, keep it. “What’s good in your life lately?” offers me a fallback when I don’t have the energy to invent something new on the spot. In place of asking new acquaintances about their profession, I often simply ask, “What’s your story?”

When in doubt, name the obvious. Standing beside an elephant sculpture at the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson, Wyoming, I commented to a woman beside me, “That’s a great elephant.” Sometimes, conversation starters can be as simple as pointing to a clothing item, a great view, or the self-evident fact that you’re standing together in a very slow line.

Echo. If a conversation stagnates, try simply restating the last thing someone said.

Be slow and soft. Your body language, including the speed of your movements and voice, communicates more than the words you choose. Hold eye contact a moment longer than expected. Pause a little longer. If you’re feeling self-conscious about your expression, imagine God seeing this person and let your face follow.

Make the most of solitude. If you’re looking to practice striking up conversations, start with someone who’s alone at a time when no one is waiting for you.  Conversations with strangers nearly always go deeper when one–on–one.  

Make yourself small. Stanton describes how he physically adjusts his posture to appear less threatening. He hunches, sweetens the tone of his voice, and often lies on the ground as he listens.

Be you. As a white woman, I benefit from positionality. I’m often perceived as less threatening than people of other racial, ethnic, and gender categories. In research, who asks the questions shapes the answers. The same is true in everyday life. People decide how to interact with us not only by the words we speak but also by our embodied gender, age, accent, and shape. But this doesn’t mean people will only speak to you if you match their profile. Our unique positionalities don’t produce better or worse encounters, just different ones. That means each of us has something unique to offer a stranger; no one else can hold a conversation like you can.

Remember why it matters. You never know how an interaction with a passerby might contribute to the hope somebody desperately needs. Sitting outside a coffee shop in Boulder, I met a man who shook my hand and introduced himself as Michael. He had wheeled a cooler strapped with a bulky canvas bag into the outdoor seating area. I noticed him greet the barista, waiting for a nod of permission to sit without ordering anything.

I asked if he’d been in Boulder long, and Michael said not long. “Didn’t come here to see celebrities either. Lots of people come to Boulder for that. I came to try to get things sorted out.” He said that today he was hoping to get his mail figured out. Somebody had stolen his identity. He was hoping to get himself some land, but farmland sure was expensive up here.

“Now I’m just trying to stay focused. Focused every day.” Michael pulled a pair of headphones from his canvas sack and arranged them around his neck. He repeated that he didn’t come to Boulder to see celebrities, but he did like music. He asked about my taste in music, and we found some common ground. “If it weren’t for music, I would have given up sometimes,” Michael said with a long sigh. “That and talking to people. Life sure gets hard. But I’ve met a lot of good people along the way.”

I echoed him in wholehearted agreement. You meet a lot of good people along the way.