Who do most of the people share their thoughts with? With those around them.
But what happens when you talk to the same people every day? You tell them your stories every day, and soon the stories just become trivial things of your daily life. Most people get used to your way of reflecting the world. At some point, in most of the cases people just share their stories just to provoke empathy or to relive what has happened.
When you talk to a stranger, however, it’s different. He doesn’t know anything about your background and your past experience with what you’re talking about, so there are a lot of things you should add to the story to make it clear. Those are the things, which you rarely have to think about when you’re talking to your closest surrounding. You have to answer the questions you think your listener would ask, as well as these that he surprises you with. That makes you think about the stuff you “just know” and “just feel”, and find explanations for them. They make you see those things that are so close to you that in order to catch them you have to distance for a while.
This lays in the foundation of the only program on BNT (Bulgarian National Television) I can honestly say I admire – “BNT Taxi”. I accidentally came upon one evening. I don’t remember when or how that happened, but I remember I really liked it because it left me a thinking. It’s like a raw material for philosophical or sociological analysis.
It presents people who travel in a taxi, where the journalists Spas Kiosev and Nevena Spasova-Batsarova drive them for free and ask them questions related to the topic of the day. I liked it because the hosts ask reasonable questions, which lead the passengers to see their stories in an unusual way and ingenuously show their personality.
Seeing the different faces of the people in Bulgaria, one can learn about the situation here, because approaching society through different people’s eyes is a great way to explore it. He can hear all kinds of people, and observe their manner of speaking, their way of expressing, and their way of thinking. He can feel close to them and like them, or see how distanced from him they are, but still he will see his society through them.
