The People Who Hold Space in Our Minds Without Earning It

The First Impressions Reverberate

Occasionally during your day, someone may walk into your life for mere moments, but they can have an unexpected and lasting effect on you. This effect could come from their smile, the way they spoke with confidence in their voice, or even the energy they exuded without trying to do so. That’s why, often, unexpected first impressions will stick in our minds until we have a chance to think about it, and find reasons for the impression to stick. Throughout the process of trying to understand why the moment mattered so much, you will continuously replay that moment in your mind, perhaps because that individual reminded you of someone close to you or that individual had some quality that you admire or wish to have. While it may be possible that the face of a stranger will fade from your memory fairly quickly, the feelings will remain – like a faint pull on your mind as you continue on with your day. And, while a stranger may not know of their impact on your life, a brief moment with a stranger often tells us more about ourselves: our values, the things we want to avoid, and the things that we feel are missing in our lives.

Creating Stories About Inanimate Things

If someone does not say anything about themselves, we begin creating a fictional (a story) for them with our minds as we picture them as characters (temporal) and develop certain characteristics (emotional, dreamlike), etc. In this example, someone sitting alone in a café, without a name, is pictured with a variety of potential backgrounds through our imagination. Similarly, we can use our imagination to develop a story for someone we passed on a busy street, creating many imagined lives in addition to the story we created. These fictional stories are not stories created by them; rather, they are created by ourselves based upon our own personal views, hopes, and fears. They represent our efforts to make a meaning from the various impressions we have from an individual and serve to clarify our own thoughts and feelings about that person and the world around us. These fictional stories often give us comfort or provide us with opportunities for speculation about others that are interesting or stimulating but most often act as a temporary escape from the realities of our own lives. The reasons these strangers take up emotional spaces in our minds are that we have used them to reflect our own emotional need for some type of emotional expression. Ultimately, however, the focus of these stories is rarely on the individual subject; rather, they highlight how we each find ways to express our individual emotional needs.

Emotional Mirrors — Why They Reflect Parts of Us

When we come across someone we have never met before, it is not uncommon to feel as though we know them on a personal level.  This connection is often created by a similarity between us and the new person.  This person’s mannerisms, speech characteristics, kindnesses and/or way of being are representative of who we fundamentally are as unique human beings.  This familiarity gives us an opportunity to recognize the characteristics in this new individual and recognize that they also exist within us, although we may or may not have been aware of them previously.  When we interact with an individual and experience emotional recognition with them, we often perceive our emotions within that person’s experience; hence, having such recognition with others creates a strong bond between us and them. Therefore, whether or not we interact again, that bond remains strong.  Emotional connections to other individuals help us better understand ourselves and create a greater sense of who we are.

The Emotional Weight of Unfinished Encounters

All things not done have a different kind of weight than all things left undone. Unfinished interactions (whether they be conversations, smiles that we did not reciprocate, questions we never asked) leave an emotional imprint – we begin to think of the “what might have been”, the “what should have been”, and we start to wonder about the things that we did not respond in time to. As a result, these lingering “almost” situations allow some individuals to consume more emotional bandwidth in our minds than would otherwise have been used creating an emotional connection. The human mind needs closure; when closure does not happen, it attempts to fill the hole with possibilities. Therefore, sometimes this person will remain in our minds, not because of who they were, but rather because of who we saw them as being at the almost finished moment. Unfinished experiences evoke many feelings related to timing, fate, and the fragile nature of our ability to connect to each other. Even the briefest encounter can create a lingering emotional impression, creating a solid reminder of an unfinished chapter.

Conclusion

Some individuals create an impression in the world by not having long or meaningful conversations, but by how their brief interactions have impacted others in memorable ways. They demonstrate that having a connection is not dependent on how long we are connected, but instead through the influence they have on us, our ability to be curious and engage our feelings to see the world in a different way. These people show us aspects of ourselves we are not always aware of and can offer us greater knowledge than those who are present for longer periods of time. Ultimately, it is not about them being present for a longer duration, but rather how we comprehend the reason those interactions occurred within ourselves.