How my hobbit parents taught me to not be average

I mention my little hobbit parents (all are dead for a long time) a lot. Mostly, this is because I am only now realizing how cool they were.

This is not just because they were great dancers and charismatic and adorable. This is not because they were amazingly huggable to everyone. Though they were. Strangers would hug my parents — often randomly.

They were cool because they were absolutely unafraid about certain things:

• Talking to strangers
• Listening to strangers
• Doing “boring” things.

TALKING TO STRANGERS

My dad never met a person — even a president — that he didn’t try to get to understand. And he never just asked people how the weather was or what they did for a living or how they were.

He’d do that, but then he’d dive right into the big questions, the deep questions. He was a lovely kind man who had no faith in his own intellect because he dropped out of school at a young age because of his dyslexia. I always grew up thinking it was fourth grade. Someone else told me it was second. It was early.

So, the way he learned was from talking and listening to other people (and also documentaries and PBS and the History Channel, those sorts of things) and doing that talking and listening in a way that was active and always ready to learn.

He was a mechanic and a truck driver and could care less about how much money someone had (ultra-rich or ultra-poor) or their other demographics, he cared about them. Never intimidated, he talked.

My mom talked to strangers because she wanted to know people’s stories, to put the puzzles of lives together.

Here’s the thing: Both my parents were curious about the world beyond them, about people who had different thoughts about living, about religion, about politics, about what success meant, about what kindness meant, about what family meant.

That made them cool.

LISTENING TO STRANGERS

It’s pretty obvious from what I wrote up there, but to my parents listening was just as important as talking. That’s uncomfortable sometimes, right?

Here’s the thing here: We usually learn the most when we let ourselves be uncomfortable.