Strangers on a Bench
As you know, or rather, as you should know if you were listening a few weeks ago, I have been keeping a Gratitude diary for the last few weeks and number 70 in my list of things for which I feel grateful this year is having discovered the podcast, “Strangers on a Bench”.
Have you ever walked past a mysterious stranger on a park bench and wondered about their lives? For 6 months last year Tom Rosenthal (who is a singer-songwriter by trade) walked around the many parks of London, approaching unknown bench-dwellers and asking if he can sit next to them, a perfect stranger, and ask them some questions, and record their conversation. Every stranger remains anonymous, neither name or place of work is ever revealed (even to Tom himself), and perhaps it is this, as well has his engaging and gentle, non-judgmental, rapport-building manner, that engenders a truly surprising degree of openness, and some strikingly intimate revelations from the participants.
He always starts in the same way, with the seemingly mundane question, “What’s your favourite day of the week?” – and the answer which the Stranger On The Bench gives to that easy opener then determines the direction which the conversation then takes as it unfolds – indeed, that is part of how a good conversation works.
He always ends his conversations in the same way as well, asking the stranger: “What are you going to do next?”.
This allows the Stranger to determine for themselves what sort of answer is required: something short-term and mundane – I am going to go and buy my cigarettes from that corner shop – or something deeper: “I may go back to my home country to see my parents” or “It’s time for me to pack in my job and find something more meaningful to do”.
Almost all the episodes end with an original piece of music, where a singer-songwriter (not Tom himself, I don’t think, but a friend or collaborator, I assume) responds to the themes of the conversation, and the Stranger’s story, as it unfolds under the gentle, encouraging, almost naïve questioning or Rosenthal. The music is often as moving as the conversation which inspired it.
I appreciate that this podcast won’t be to everyone’s tastes – nothing particularly happens, and nor is there anything directly educational conveyed – but I have come to absolutely love it. I love it because – and this is number 71 in my Gratitude list – it gives me an appreciation of the ‘extraordinary ordinary’: the beauty and goodness and remarkable-ness which is to be found in the everyday. Life really is extraordinary if you are prepared to stop and look and listen to it.
Too much of modern culture encourages a sort of ‘greatest hits’ mentality – influencers posting only when they are looking at their glamorous best, exclusively in glamorous locations – but actually, what is really good about life isn’t the confected artifice of Instragram. It’s when you come to appreciate the extraordinary ordinary that life really becomes beautiful. The podcast has also reinforced my sense that (number 72) most people are good and interesting and interested and intelligent, each and every one of them with a real story to tell, and everyone is uniquely and differently but equally worthwhile. Finally, for me, it is a reminder that it is more valuable to be interested than interesting. I suspect that I spent too much time in the first two decades of my adulthood trying to be interesting rather than being interested. I am not saying you should all be thrusting microphones in the faces of every stranger you encounter in parks – you might find yourself assaulted or insulted or arrested, and certainly frequently rebuffed – but I am saying: be curious, be interested, be open-minded, be empathetic as you walk past the park benches of this world, literal and metaphorical, and you will find that there is a richness and beauty and fascination in life way deeper than anything you’ll find on social media.