Human Nature

What is it about people that makes us so willing to tell our whole life story to total strangers? Is it just me? Is there something about me that makes people tell me everything even when I'm not looking for their stories? It's not like I'm going around announcing that I'm a pastor either.

Today, I was just ready to lay low and get some work done.... laundry, banking & bills, figuring out how to download and resize the photos I've been taking, reading..... but as I sat at the laundry room engrossed in my book, first one neighbor approached me and then another. The first one obviously had some mental health issues. She was telling me all about how her husband locked up her cigarettes and seemed to want me to help her with that somehow. Then she had barely left and I was back into my book and another woman came with tons of laundry. I ended up hearing all about her daughter's move to England, her own health issues, her husband's motorcycle accident which resulted in finding a cancerous tumor on his kidney that they wouldn't have found otherwise, her father's recent death, etc. It didn't help to put my book up as I was trying to read, she just kept going on and on and I wondered how many bad things can happen to one woman (I won't go into all the details.)

But then again, I did go on the road to hear people's stories, right? They can't all be interesting and exciting. It does make me wonder about human nature though. Just when I think no one can possibly be more likely to go into their life story than I am, I meet a bunch of them! I guess I should remember that the next time I start to bare my own soul to some stranger on the street....