Feeling at Home with Strangers

If I truly believe that we are all connected, it ought to be natural for me to feel at home with strangers. But, I am limited, I should say defined, by my experiences. If I have had positive, supportive, loving experiences with someone, I will find it fairly easy to find a comfortable connection to others who share some commonalities with that original person. How do I feel at ease, at home, with people who are very unfamiliar to me? Sometimes it is not at all difficult. If I see in that person qualities of kindness, vulnerability, fear, puzzlement, aspects that aren’t threatening to me, it is easy to feel connected and feel the shared humanness between us. The problem of feeling comfortable with, at home with, people I have been familiar with before or been in close contact with, is challenged when we experience them as threatening to us or to others. If there is the opportunity or time to more carefully observe their changing behaviors, there is the chance that our first impressions of suspicion, judgements, and our fear instincts, will change and we will see these now “strangers,” as variations of ourselves. But when we clearly see strangers performing cruel acts against humanity, not acting with loving-kindness, why would I feel at home with them? Still, it remains true that the more I can take the time to understand why another person acts, thinks, believes the way they do, the less I live in a world with strangers and the more I live in a world with all kinds of people.  But people who need to control, harm, frighten, and murder others, I do not see them as human, but as inhumane, cruel and tragically deformed.