When I used to ride the subway
How Airbnb is supplying my involuntary dose of humanity
When I lived in Brooklyn, off the Nostrand A/C subway stop, I got up close and personal with plenty of what humanity has to offer—the loud, the smelly, the subtle, the joy, the boredom, the rare and fleeting conversation, the standing-too-close’ness, the complex borderline of observer/observed. The subway and streets of New York were my opportunity to participate in humanity without doing too much along the lines of trying.
Now that I’ve moved back to Austin, Texas, where I work from home as a freelance writer, I find my opportunities for involuntary doses of humanity extremely limited. My chances of being in a room with (much less shoved up against) people who are not my dog, my wife or my consulting clients are reserved for sitting in (OMG the) traffic on narrow city streets with windows down, the line at the Mexican grocery store in my neighborhood, or the various cafes where it appears everyone has a beard and a trucker hat (and hence don’t count toward diversifying my experience). I’m not complaining. I love it here despite my fair city’s dearth of different.
When my wife and I moved into a 3-bedroom house on the east side that was a bit more in rent than we felt comfortable paying, we decided to rent one of our bedrooms out on Airbnb.
People ask all the time if it’s weird to have strangers in your home. I don’t really think of it that way. Our experience over the last two years has been interesting and within the last six months our listing must’ve increased in ranking, hence the room has been booked nearly every day of recent high season months and continues on being full up until Austin becomes a sauna for six months. We even are toying with moving a little further east, getting some chickens and setting up a real bed & breakfast. (We are serious and Airbnb has been a great trial run.)
A recent guest totally flipped my perspective, an experience I recognized from days of being startled out of my observer role on the subway. He was visually impaired and needed a little more from me than typical guests. Initially I was (admittedly) mildly irritated since I couldn’t just rely on our usual quirky notes on how to make coffee, how to get on our wifi, where to eat nearby, to just consult the printed bus schedule or transit website for how to get around, etc. Instead, I made the coffee, I pulled out the breakfast items we offer, I explained how to get from our house to the various places on his list, what side of the street to stand on. We sat down together on his second and final morning in town and we talked about our lives and beliefs, which were respectively opposite and the same. I forgot how being forced to talk to people even when you don’t really feel like it sometimes pans out to a beautiful, life-altering moment.
Thanks to this rental, and minor shift in our hospitality norm, I learned to appreciate my position in humanity. I learned that someone without much along the lines of vision can come to town on a Greyhound bus from the Dallas area, take CapMetro public transit to get around town and all the places I suggested (so inspiring). I learned that I’m not always in charge of how interactions will go (always surprising, usually for the better, eventually). I learned that inviting strangers (within a secure platform like Airbnb) into my life changes me in the ways sitting in a sticky orange seat on the F train did, though in this case always actively instead of sometimes passively.
I remembered how to listen to someone and share a moment that has no particular significance beyond that it is this moment, how nice it is to discover similarities with people who are very different from you.
