The Stranger on the Train Who Changed How I Think About Time
Three years ago, I was on the 6:47 AM train to Chicago, staring at my phone and mentally rehearsing a presentation I’d give that afternoon. The woman across from me was maybe seventy, with silver hair and reading glasses that kept sliding down her nose. She was knitting something with bright purple and orange yarn.
When the train lurched around a curve, her yarn ball rolled toward my feet. I picked it up and handed it back. “Thank you,” she said, then added, “You know, I’ve been making this same scarf pattern for forty years, and I still discover new things about it every time.” She held up her needles. “Isn’t that strange? How something can be completely familiar and completely surprising at once?”
I nodded politely, expecting that to be the end of it. But her words wouldn’t leave me alone. Long after I’d forgotten my presentation went fine, I kept thinking about what she said. I started noticing this everywhere. My morning coffee routine that suddenly felt different when I switched mugs. The walk to work I’d taken hundreds of times that revealed a new mural I somehow never saw. Even conversations with my partner of eight years that could still catch me completely off guard.
I think about that knitting woman whenever I catch myself rushing through something familiar, assuming I know everything there is to know about it. Which happens embarrassingly often.
What My Nephew Taught Me About Questions
My six-year-old nephew has this relentless habit of asking “But why?” after every answer you give him. Last month, he asked why the sky was blue. I gave him the standard explanation about light scattering. “But why does light scatter?” he shot back. So I explained about wavelengths. “But why are wavelengths different?” And down the rabbit hole we went.
Most adults would have gotten frustrated by question four. I almost did. But somewhere around question seven (“But why do our eyes work that way?”), I realized he wasn’t being difficult. He was genuinely curious about how deep this whole thing went. More importantly, he hadn’t learned yet that there’s supposed to be a socially acceptable stopping point.
I’ve started applying this to my own thinking, though less obviously than a six-year-old would. When someone says they’re “fine” but their shoulders are hunched up around their ears, instead of accepting the surface answer, I wonder what “fine” actually means to them right now. When I catch myself saying I’m busy, I ask what I’m really busy with and why I’ve chosen that particular busy-ness over everything else competing for my time.
It’s not about being nosy or overthinking everything into the ground. It’s about staying curious about the layers underneath the first answer, the way my nephew naturally is. The conversations that result from this kind of curiosity tend to be the ones that actually matter.
The Coworker Who Redefined Productivity for Me
Sarah from accounting has this habit of taking what she calls “thinking walks” during her lunch break. No podcast, no phone calls, just walking around the block with her hands in her pockets. I used to think she was wasting perfectly good networking time, or at least time she could spend catching up on emails or listening to something educational.
One day I asked her about it, probably in a way that sounded more judgmental than I intended. She said, “I do my best problem-solving when I’m not trying to solve problems. Yesterday during my walk, I figured out that billing mess that had me stuck for three days. Not because I was thinking about billing, but because I gave my brain permission to wander around and make connections I wouldn’t have made sitting at my desk staring at spreadsheets.”
This blew my mind. I had always equated productivity with visible effort, with looking busy. I started experimenting with my own version of thinking walks. Sometimes they’re actual walks, sometimes they’re doing dishes without a podcast playing, sometimes they’re just sitting on my front steps with coffee and zero agenda.
The solutions that pop up during these deliberately unproductive moments are often better than anything I come up with through focused effort. Sarah was right about the wandering brain making unexpected connections. I just had to unlearn the idea that productive thinking looks like thinking really, really hard.
The Conversation That Changed How I Apologize
I was having dinner with a friend who mentioned that her partner had apologized to her that morning for something small. “But here’s the thing,” she said, “he didn’t just say sorry. He said, ‘I’m sorry I interrupted you while you were telling me about your meeting. That must have felt dismissive, and I want to hear the rest of your story.’ It was so specific.”
She took a sip of wine and continued, “Most people apologize like they’re checking a box. Sorry becomes this generic word that doesn’t actually acknowledge what happened. But when someone gets specific about what they’re apologizing for and why it mattered, it feels completely different.”
Ouch. I was definitely a generic apologizer. “Sorry I’m late” without acknowledging that being late meant someone else had to wait, or that it might have stressed them out, or that it messed with their schedule. “Sorry about that” without naming what “that” actually was and why it deserved an apology.
Now I try to apologize the way her partner did. It takes longer and requires me to actually think about the impact of my actions, but the conversations that follow these specific apologies are usually much better. They’re more honest, and they often prevent the same issue from happening again because we’ve actually talked about what went wrong instead of just acknowledging that something did.
Still Figuring It Out
I keep a note in my phone called “Things People Said” where I jot down conversations like these when they happen. Not the profound, quotable moments you might expect, but the small observations that shift how I see something ordinary. The pattern I’m noticing is that these conversations usually come from people who are paying attention differently than I am. Whether that’s a knitting woman seeing the familiar as surprising, or a six-year-old who hasn’t learned to stop asking questions.
I’m still working out what makes some conversations stick while others fade immediately. I think it has something to do with timing and being open and maybe just dumb luck. But I’m getting better at recognizing them when they happen, and at creating space where they’re more likely to occur. What conversations have stuck with you? I’d love to hear about the random remarks that ended up changing how you think about something.