Life is fragile.
It takes one pound of pressure to puncture skin.
Fifteen pounds to bend your elbow the wrong way, twenty five pounds to bend your knees the opposite direction.
Three words to change someone's life. Two words to ruin someone's day.

Why are we so adjusted to living day to day? When you walk into a grocery store you will see two hundred people in there at a time. You see one thousand different people each day. Yet you can go that whole day without making eye contact with anyone. Why?
Why would we do that? Why would we not want to look into someone else's eye? Are we afraid? What if they look back? What if they say "hi"? Or try to start a conversation? I don't have time for that. I don't want to know them. I don't care.

Is it easier to not talk to people? Yes.
Is it more fun to avoid them? No.

We love to talk to people. We have friends we hang out with, talk on the phone with, go see a movie with, so on... But what ever happened to the plain and basic "'Morning Stranger, how's your day?" Too cowboy for you? Why not "Hi, what's up?" That may be too much if you are in a hurry. But you can always take the time to compliment someone. "Hi there! You have great hair!" -and keep walking. A two second sentence could make someone's day. Isn't that great? Wouldn't you want someone to make you feel good?

We are so fragile, to let two seconds change our attitude for the day. To let someone who we don't know, and probably will never see again. (Even though they probably live a block away from you.) Change the way you live.

I've caught myself several times now reading the obituaries and getting involved in the three paragraphs that tell that person's life.
A Vietnam War veteran died Tuesday, he was 63. He died of a heart attack. He left four kids and his wife behind. He loved to play baseball and watched it whenever it was on TV. I began to imagine what he did in the war. Did he kill? Or was he just a supplier that traveled base to base delivering food. When did he meet his wife? How long have they been married? How is she taking his death? How old are his kids? I caught myself crying for someone I didn't know and never met. That person changed my life in a small but significant way.

What if somebody close to you died? How would you deal with it?
What if it was somebody you didn't know? I passed a car crash earlier this evening. What if someone had died in it? How would that ripple back to family and friends, and friends of friends?
Somebody you have never met or even heard of is affecting the way you live your life. We're clockwork. Even though we don't make eye contact with the people we pass by daily, they change our lives. They shape the path that you are walking on.

Why not give them a little credit for it? I'm going to try and say hello to the people I meet, maybe I'll make friends, maybe I'll make their day, maybe they'll make mine. Will you do that too? Just a "Hello.", or a "Nice hat!" will do. Just do it more often. It wakes people up and makes the gears of our clockwork society turn a little differently. And maybe that's all we need to change the world.