Consider the following comments on strangers.
A stranger is only a person whose story we have not yet been told.
We trust the crowd of strangers around us more than we ever admit.
There is a freedom in the company of those who do not know who we are supposed to be.
Sometimes a stranger sees us more clearly than the people who have decided who we are.
We fear the stranger most when we suspect what we might owe them.
Write a reflective piece in response to one or more of these comments. Your essay will be assessed on the quality of your thinking and the way you express it.
A way into this prompt
A reflective thesis is that strangers occupy a strange place in our inner lives, at once the figures we are taught to fear and the only people before whom we are briefly free to be anyone at all. Open with a concrete encounter, an unexpected kindness from someone we never saw again, or the odd intimacy of a conversation with a person we will not meet twice. Then explore the tension between the stranger as threat, the instinctive wariness we carry, and the stranger as relief, unburdened by the expectations our familiars have fixed on us. A useful structural move notices that we depend constantly on the goodwill of strangers we never thank, and that civilisation is in part a vast agreement among people who will never know each other. Caution: resist the easy lesson that we should simply trust more, since the same openness that lets a stranger surprise us with kindness is the openness that can be exploited, and wisdom lies in telling the situations apart.