The People You Almost Know: Why Small Connections Count

Summer’s winding down, and here at SixDegrees, we’re in a moment of quiet. 

I’ve always struggled with stillness. It makes me feel like I’m not “doing enough.” But lately, in the earlier sunsets and the crickets’ fall songs, I’ve made a conscious effort to see the quiet as an invitation to pay closer attention. And lately, that attention keeps landing in the same place: my middle school crossing guard. A towering, jolly presence I’d see for all of four minutes a day, on the days I walked to school. He had a booming voice that would yell, “Here we go!” after he’d smack the stop sign on his leg. 

One day, our middle school had an assembly. The principal ran through the usual announcements first. Then he let us all know that the crossing guard had passed away. I’ll never forget how he treated telling us like it was something to check off his list. I’ll also never forget needing to go to the bathroom to cry. I sat in a stall, tears streaming down my face, and questions flashed through my mind: 

“Why didn’t I talk to him more?”

“Why didn’t I get to know him?”

I didn’t understand why it hit me so hard. I barely knew him. But there I was, crying over someone whose name I’m not sure I ever knew.

I've thought about him a lot these last few weeks. Probably more than makes sense, over twenty years later. But he’s made me pay attention to the smaller connections I still have.

For me, these days, it’s the barista at the coffee shop around the corner from my apartment. During one of our first real exchanges, she complimented me on my nails. She is there almost every time I stop in, and we gab about things like the weather or how busy the coffee shop is. She knows I get oat milk in my latte. I know her favorite hat to wear has a tennis racket on it. And on the mornings I see her, my day starts off a little warmer.

Sociologists have a name for these kinds of connections. They call them weak ties: the people orbiting the edges of our lives, not quite strangers, not quite friends. The name undersells them, but the idea is right. 

Researchers put these connections to the test in none other than a coffee line and found that people who took a moment to actually connect with their barista walked away in a better mood than those who kept it quick and transactional. The reason? A small, measurable sense of belonging (Sandstrom & Dunn, 2014).

Belonging is where this gets bigger than just a good mood. It’s not only the people in these spaces that hold us. It’s the spaces themselves. Sociologist Ray Oldenburg called them third places. Not home, not work, but the in-between spots where a neighborhood actually becomes one. Where you’re a regular. Where somebody knows your order. He argued these places are where belonging gets built: in the small, repeated, low-stakes hellos. 

But there’s a catch to all this: third places are getting harder to find. A third place used to be free, or close to it. Now, belonging often costs an $8 latte. And the ones that didn’t cost anything tend to vanish with a life stage: age out of school and the daily run-ins go with it, leave the office and the hallway hellos disappear too. So what’s left? The library, maybe. A park. The come-as-you-are spots are thinning out, and I don’t think we’ve fully clocked what we lose with them. Which is maybe why I keep circling back to a man I connected with at no cost.

I asked myself why I didn’t talk to the crossing guard more. But I think I was asking the wrong question. That connection was already there: four minutes a day, for years. I just didn’t have permission to count it, and that’s where we get it wrong. We save the word connection for the big things, the close things, the ones we chase. And while we’re waiting for those, the small ones are everywhere, holding us up, going unnamed.

It’s still quiet here. And the quiet turned out to be good for something. It got me to notice the people I’d been walking past. The crossing guard I can’t thank anymore. The barista I still can. Maybe connection was never only the new and the deep. Maybe it’s also the familiar face, the standing hello, the ones we already have…if we let them count.

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Here at SixDegrees, we want to move people from strangers to a greater sense of belonging. And a lot of that work is exactly what this essay has been circling: changing how we see the connections already around us.

Who’s your crossing guard? Let us know.