About Tiny Encounters
Every person is more than the first story we tell ourselves about them.
Purpose
Every person you pass is living a life every bit as rich, complicated, and unfinished as your own. Tiny Encounters is a companion for remembering that.
Its three practices invite you to imagine before concluding, attend before judging, and, sometimes, meet before moving on. There is no method to master and nothing to complete. You can explore all three, stay with one for as long as it continues to surprise you, or return whenever a question catches your attention.
Background
There is a word for the quiet realisation that every passer-by is living a vivid and complex life of their own: sonder. John Koenig coined it for The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. Tiny Encounters grew from the question that follows that realisation: now what?
How might we carry that moment of recognition into ordinary life? How might we become less certain of the stories we tell ourselves about other people? How might we notice with greater generosity, and become more available when a genuine encounter begins?
Those questions became three practices. Imagine loosens the certainty of first impressions. Attend asks us to choose the quality of our attention. Meet helps us recognise moments when curiosity is already becoming relationship, while respecting another person’s freedom to engage or decline.
The book also acknowledges two creative companions: Better Strangers by Charlotte Anciaux Henry and Timothée Groleau, and The Unexpected Encounter by Joran Koster.
Vision
The hope behind Tiny Encounters is deliberately modest. It does not claim to solve loneliness, misunderstanding, or conflict. It asks what might shift if we pause a little longer before deciding what we know, notice details that habit has taught us to overlook, and leave more room for another possibility.
The practices begin with strangers because strangers allow us to look with fresh eyes. Yet they do not end there. They can return in how we meet a neighbour, colleague, friend, parent, partner, or even ourselves.
One day, the cards may become less necessary because their questions have quietly become part of how you move through the world.
The world is still the same world.
You may simply be meeting it a little differently.