A boy who escaped the holocaust.
A single mom.
A refugee.
These are just some of the people I’ve shared an Uber ride with. I’ve taken more rideshares than most, and through that, I’ve come to an important understanding. Some people are always ready to open up and share a piece of their history with you, if only given the opportunity. An opportunity as simple as a “How are you?”, can entice them to share deeply personal and meaningful stories.
When I first began ridesharing, I kept to myself, thinking it was already awkward enough to be in the backseat of a strangers car, let alone engaging them in small talk. One day, however, as I headed to an exam I was dreading, the Uber driver sensed something in my silence, and asked me how I was doing. The question was simple enough, but the confluence of an already bad week and a looming exam triggered something inside me, and I began sharing my worries. For the rest of the ride, the driver kept encouraging me to perk up, be positive, and know that my sense of self-worth should not defined by a simple exam grade. It helped me get out of my head, and walk into the exam with a newfound confidence. It also changed my view of what these rides could offer. Far from being a listless trip, these rides offered a potential to truly learn from and connect with a stranger. The inevitability that we would never see each other again, driver and passenger, helped remove the social stigma of sharing personal stories with strangers.
In the following weeks and months, I made it a habit to strike up conversations with the drivers and riders I encountered. We talked about the mundane and the marvelous, delved into history, philosophy, and even politics. But sometimes, the drivers would began unpacking their personal histories, and for the next half hour or so, I would be transported into the minds of these drivers and passengers. One driver, a father of 2, shared with me his worries for his children, that they were not ambitious enough in college and would find themselves struggling in the job market. Another, a single mom, shared her joy at her children getting acceptance into a prestigious university. Another, an old man from Hungary, shared the story of his family’s escape from the country on the eve of Nazi Germany’s occupation, the hard days on the run, and their final voyage to England. This last story, more than the rest, showed me the true extent of how much people could share. To hear stories of war and pain, hope and salvation, from half a lifetime ago, brought to life in the backseat of a Toyota is a powerful thing.
Hearing these stories day in day out changed how I viewed the strangers around me. While we may be the star at the center of our own unfolding story, all around us are people that live lives as vivid and complex as our own. A quote I often go back to goes “They [strangers] carry on invisibly around you, bearing the accumulated weight of their own ambitions, friends, routines, mistakes, worries, triumphs and inherited craziness”. It helped me understand that the people around us, the strangers we pass every day of our lives, are not just background actors to our own stories, but people living out their own stories, their own struggles and triumphs.
When I brought this realization up to another driver, he laughed, saying that it was a reality he lived
Editor: S. Tabrias
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