the value of the friendship of strangers
Transcript of this video:
I was taking part in an unhurried conversation earlier this week and we found ourselves talking about what sort of relationships we form with the other people who come to these occasional conversations.
This one was in a coffee shop in Cambridge and we realised that we quite like the fact that we could have sort of friendships within the group with people that we then didn’t see again outside of the group.
and someone said that actually if one of their friends from outside or she put it one of her more opinionated friends from outside would start coming she might start to feel a bit constrained by that there’s something about the
the ability to be more open with strangers.
And I smiled as she said this because I started thinking about a workshop I went to in Germany last year, where during one of those conversations over dinner, we were discussing the fact that in this German spa hotel, it was customary to go naked into the sauna together.
and the general conclusion was that whilst we were probably okay with that with strangers we wouldn’t want that to be the case with the people on the workshop with us with our work colleagues it’s the same it’s the same phenomenon and it made me think how easily in our familiar relationships with friends or with the people that we work with
Perhaps without necessarily noticing it, we start to become a bit constrained by the fact that we already know them and possibly start not to see quite so much potential in the relationship to lose some of the potential creativity.
And it would be a good thing, I think, to cultivate a capacity to look at our familiar friends
with fresh eyes so that we can see a bit more potential outside our established habits, even if we still might not want to go to the sauna with them.
Photo by Anne Nygård on Unsplash
