There are no strangers here; Only friends you haven't yet met.

Time and attention make the friend

There's something almost radical about meeting someone new with genuine curiosity instead of suspicion. This isn't about naive optimism—it's about recognizing that the only real difference between a friend and a stranger is time and attention. When you're stuck in an elevator with someone awkward, or sitting next to a stranger at a dinner party, you could see them as an obstacle or a question mark. But Yeats suggests something more useful: they're just someone whose story you haven't heard yet.

This matters especially now, when it's easier than ever to stay in our bubbles. We can curate our feeds, choose our neighborhoods, and avoid uncomfortable conversations entirely. But the people we dismiss as "not our type"—the neighbor with different politics, the coworker with a strange sense of humor, the person at the coffee shop—often become exactly the people who shift how we think. They have embarrassing stories, surprising talents, or hard-won wisdom we couldn't have predicted from a glance.

The practical shift here is small but real: it's the difference between preparing to politely endure someone and actually listening to them. That posture of openness doesn't mean you'll befriend everyone, but it means you'll stop wasting energy on the assumption that you're talking to a stranger rather than a friend you've just met.