Strangers

Yesterday was a very long day.  My husband and I were traveling home, and had reservations on an 8:29 PM flight.  There were a lot of weather disruptions in the US air system from early in the morning, and then additional complications in the system due to the terrorist attack at the airport in Istanbul, Turkey.

Our 8:29 PM flight left the ground at 2:30 this morning.  A six hour delay in a flight is always difficult, but when the flight origination time is late already, it makes for a long day.  We finally got to our house at about 5:30 this morning, which was 6:30 in the time zone we had woken up in about twenty four hours earlier.

But, in spite of it being a very long day, it was kind of a very good day.  I've never quite experienced anything like it before.

There were multiple delayed flights, many of them in the six or more hours of delay.  The airport in Newark was very crowded.

What was remarkable to me was how unphased by the inconvenience most everyone was.  There was a remarkable level of compassion, of good cheer, of cooperation and kindness evidenced everywhere I looked.

My husband and I had multiple random conversations with strangers, all very positive, even though they all included dismay at the continual cascading delays.

Newark is not noteworthy as a friendly city.  In fact, the greater New York metropolitan area has a reputation of being tough and unfriendly.  But I saw a remarkable niceness in Newark Liberty International Airport yesterday.

And it restored my faith in people.  Because we can roll with inconvenience without hostility.  And we can sit together in strange places and find topics of conversation that are not provocative.

My husband and I had a conversation with one stranger about how surprisingly good the food was at one airport restaurant.

We had another conversation with another stranger about the New Orleans Saints football team's prospects for the 2016 season.

We had another conversation with two strangers about their anticipated visit to New Orleans, and different things that they could do while here on vacation.

We had another conversation with a stranger about running and racewalking and testing yourself against your physical limits.

And multiple conversations with multiple strangers sharing air travel horror stories.

And overwhelmingly, people were nice, and friendly and upbeat, even though it was a tremendously inconvenient situation.

I don't know if the horror of the attacks in Turkey made us all appreciate how benign the inconvenience we were experiencing actually was, or if it was just a special crowd on a special day.

With all the media attention on how acrimonious we can be as a society, it was gratifying to see some good old fashioned niceness play out in a very public place.

And if you can have a positive experience in Newark Liberty International Airport in the midst of hundreds of delayed and cancelled flights, you can have a positive experience just about anywhere.

There are still more good, nice, kind people in the world than you think.  And yesterday, I was fortunate to be surrounded by them.