The power of the stranger lies in what they bring out in us.

“With strangers, there is a temporary reordering of a balancing act that each of is is constantly attempting: between our past selves and our future selves, between who we have been and who we are becoming. Your friends and family know who you have been, and they often make it harder to try out who you might become… Strangers, unconnected to our pasts and, in most cases, to out futures, are easier to experiment around. They create a temporary freedom to pilot-test what we might become, however untethered that identity is to what we have been. They allow us to try out new ideas. In front of a stranger, we are free to choose what we want to show, hide, or even invent.”

Illustrated response to a quote from the book The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why it Matters by founding member of the Sustained Dialogue Campus Network, Priya Parker.