What We Owe Each Other as Strangers in Public

Every day, we perform quiet negotiations with people we'll never see again. At the crosswalk, in the grocery store, in traffic. A hand holds a door for a few extra seconds. Someone steps aside so you can pass. A stranger smiles back. These are such ordinary gestures that we barely notice them until they're missing. When someone lets the door slam in your face, when no one moves on a crowded bus, when the person behind you in line sighs loudly, the air shifts. The public becomes a place of friction instead of flow.

I keep thinking about how fragile this web of public life is. How it relies on tiny acts of care that no one is obligated to perform, but that hold the world together anyway.

In the small theatre of public life, morality doesn't look like grand heroism. It looks like micro decisions. Whether to hold your tongue, to wait your turn, to make room for someone else's comfort. These are invisible ethics of the everyday, what philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah called our "micro-morality". The small-scale obligations that make social life bearable.

Civility is often dismissed as shallow, but maybe it's more like mercy in miniature. When we lower our voices in a cafe or hold an elevator door for the person running behind, we're not just being polite, we're honouring an unspoken contract that says I will not make your day any harder than it already is. These gestures are tiny testaments to the idea that we share a world, even if only for a moment.

We rarely know what other people are carrying. The person who cuts you off in traffic might be rushing to a hospital. The cashier who seems curt might be on her third double shift this week. The person staring blankly on the bus might be mourning something they can't yet name. The truth is, every public space is filled with invisible suffering. And quite frankly? Not everything is about you.

When we choose patience, when we offer a nod, or even just withhold irritation, we're practising a small kind of grace. We're saying, "I don't know your story, but I'll try not to add to your weight." Sometimes, that's all we can give, but it's not nothing.

Once, in the middle of a miserable and cold week in Seoul, I was making my way to work in the morning, and the steep roads leading up to my bus stop were all iced up. In my hurry to make it on time, I ignored all the black ice warnings, and I missed a step, taking a big tumble, dropping all of my belongings on the slushy road. An old man ran across the street to help me up, using what limited English he knew to make sure that I was alright. It was such a small moment, over in seconds, but I've not forgotten it. Not the words themselves, but the recognition. For a heartbeat, someone saw me, and that seeing, on that icy winter morning, felt like kindness distilled in its purest form.

When we forget this shared obligation, the world hardens. Cities become areas of impatience. We start moving through public life like it's a competition for space. Car horns blaring, shoulders brushing, earbuds in, eyes down. We stop seeing people as people and start seeing them as obstacles. The slow walker, the loud talker, the stranger in the way.

Technology makes this easier. Our phones give us private worlds inside public ones. We scroll through the lives of people we know while ignoring the ones physically around us. Yet, paradoxically, that disconnection erodes something essential. Without those micro-gestures of acknowledgement, the collective trust that makes shared life possible begins to fade.

But lately, I've been thinking about another kind of public, one without borders. What do we owe the strangers we'll never stand beside on a train? The ones whose names we'll never learn, whose streets we'll never walk?

Because the truth is, our moral circle doesn't end at the edge of our own pavements. The same empathy that asks us to hold space for the stranger next to us also calls us to care about strangers far away. In Palestine, in Sudan, in the Congo. Whole nations holding their breath through war and loss, while we scroll past headlines that blur together.

We may not be able to hold a door open for them, but we can hold their stories open. We can take an interest, bear witness, share what we learn, and refuse to let their pain be erased by distance or distraction. Even our attention, our willingness to care, is a kind of moral act. It lets people know that their lives matter to us, even if we may never meet them.

This kind of public empathy asks more of us. It's easy to be kind when someone smiles back. It's harder when compassion requires discomfort. When it means confronting our own privilege, or challenging the convenient indifference that global distance allows. Because indifference is what lets cruelty thrive. And empathy, even from afar, is its quiet resistance.

And then there are the strangers who feel so close they could be us. The women, like myself, in South Africa, who live in the shadow of gender-based violence. Women who wake up measuring their safety in small, exhausting calculations.

Women For Change has been gathering these stories, one by one, across the country. They use their platform to share stories of assault, of loss, and survival. And somehow, through that pain, they build a connection. They remind women they're not alone. That even in fear, there's kinship. The brave women behind this page have been calling for one thing: for the government to declare gender-based violence a national crisis. Their symbol is simple: the colour purple. With thousands of profile pictures being turned purple across the country, this one small act of visibility shows one shared thread of solidarity.

It's a reminder that what we owe each other as women, as humans, as strangers, is to care. To care enough to act, even symbolically.

What we owe each other as strangers is a little patience, a little attention, and a willingness to see. Those gestures, no matter how small they may seem, might just be the quiet foundation of everything else.

Every gesture of care, no matter how fleeting, is a refusal to let the world become cruel by default. Every moment of empathy, whether for the person beside us or the people beyond our borders, is a way of saying we're still connected, still responsible, and most of all, still human.

"Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu"- I am because you are. So maybe what we owe each other as strangers in public is simple kindness. And maybe kindness isn't about being nice but rather about remembering that we belong to each other, even in the briefest crossings of our lives.