From the air, the city is nothing but a million twinkling lights flowing in a sea of molten gold. The flow of the city is constant and effortless; each street a river, each block a riverbed. The plane of a hundred or so passengers draws closer to the runway, yet the city remains distant.

All these passengers, each with their own story, their own history, beliefs, culture, and name- gather on a single plane. Every one of them is headed somewhere. Whether a lonely house with a cold bed awaits them or a warm home with open arms, a new exciting opportunity or a place to settle, I will never know.

The beauty of strangers is that they are strangers. The city below holds millions of twinkling lights alongside a million untold stories and millions of people I will never meet or even see.

It may be hard to comprehend, sometimes, that every plane that flies overhead or every car that speeds by on the highway contains at least one person; at least one being, who, at one point, had a mother and a father, who was brought into this world, and who struggled with life’s intrigues. In each and every situation with each and every person we encounter, we have this in common.

This doesn’t devalue the significance of any one person; in fact, this is where each person is proven to be precious. To find importance in strangers is to find importance in oneself. Each and every person has a different story to share, each story involving different friends, different families, and overall, different lives. Each person has a unique view of life that may not be understood or accepted by others, yet it is not his or her thought that holds the highest value- it is the fact, the beautiful significance, that every single personal experience has formed that person’s impression.

The interactions between ourselves with strangers or the ones we love, whether harmonious or destructive, shape our lives whether we realize it or not. However small and insignificant we may see ourselves, and however true that may be considering the vastness of time and space, we are important to the here and now.

My plane ride, only four hours of my life, a blip in my timeline, would not have been the same without the constantly sneezing woman to my right, the introverted columnist to my left, the happy baby making faces at me through the seats, his grandfather with his beeping hearing aid, the colorful woman with colorful hair, the singing stewardess, the canoodling couple behind me, or the young mother struggling to calm her child. I am certain that I will never see any of these people again, yet at that moment in time, they, collectively, were the most prominent element in my life.

Viewed through this perspective, one must accept the fact that our trivial problems do not matter. Road rage, angry rants and passive aggressiveness will ultimately be nothing more than short-lived moments of regret. Take a breath and move on. If one does not, his problems will always seem more significant than his successes.