The Minor Joys of Chance Encounters

I found myself marooned in a relatively long Uber conversation about the meaning of life. And I think I liked it.

There I was again, in an Uber with a driver who seemed to want nothing more than to chat. In this case, she had a number of life lessons for me. I was vaguely irritated. I had work to get done, and I was hoping to have twenty minutes to type away, under the illusion perhaps that I could fight time by taking these bite-sized drives and making them into more than the sum of their somewhat meaningless parts.

I eagerly put my earphones on, the ubiquitous and universal signal for “please, I’m a misanthrope, don’t talk to me.” Coupled with a suitably dour expression of purpose mixed with disinterest, it almost always worked. But, today, I was weak. And she was committed. One of her life lessons, which she repeated several times, was that people hear, but rarely do they listen. After this admonition, I felt it would be awkward to do the opposite. Not only that, most of the happiness podcasts I listen to have advised me to engage in normal social interactions with random people. Apparently, the empirical data is conclusive: talking to people in cars, elevators, and in the grocery store line makes most people happier (to which I would offer the silent rebuttal: well, what if I’m not most people?).

She was relentless. I had no choice. So I relented. I listened. I found myself smiling, despite myself. I was both intrigued and confused, two sentiments that often go together, sitting in a kind of tension. Okay, fine, that was an intriguing thing you just said while trying not to hit the car right next to us. Okay, you lost me there, that’s a bit confusing.

The line between banality and profundity is always a murky one. “First we feel. Then we fall.” Banal or profound? I have no idea, nor do I have any idea what it’s supposed to mean. But that’s not from my Uber driver, it’s from James Joyce in Finnegan’s Wake.

She was telling me how to live. It wasn’t too different than the happiness podcasts, with their mix of new age exhortations and ancient wisdom, presumably if not always explicitly derived from a divine source.

I asked follow up questions. She seemed to be drawing on Rene Girard’s theory of mimetic desire when she told me not to want what society wanted me to want, but to want what I wanted. Fair enough. But then I replied, perhaps inspired by

Oliver Traldi

’s recent essay: but how do I come to know what I want? I won’t bore you with her responses, except to say that they sort of, kind of resonated. Was it the content of what she said, or the force with which she said it? She had what I didn’t: certainty. She also guessed my age, incorrectly floating 31 as an initial bid, which endeared me to her.

It was almost as if she sensed I was searching, cautioning me about the perils of excessive ambition and correctly guessing why a previous relationship went wrong. She said something in particular that eerily echoed a particular thought that I had been having in recent days, as if she had somehow gained access to my own deliberations like a reporter who sneaks into the otherwise closed upper chamber of a fractious parliament.

As we approached our destination, an apartment filled with memories and regrets, she seemed to suggest that I had found myself in her Uber out of all the other Ubers because I was ready. Ready for what, I wasn’t entirely sure. For complex theological reasons, I don’t generally perceive God as particularly interventionist. They call them chance encounters for a reason, but even this understated phrase hints at something cosmically meaningful.

Also, she told me to buy her book.

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