A few months ago, I was standing in line at a small bookstore when the woman in front of me asked the bookseller an unusual question.

"I'm looking for a novel," she said, "that will make me miss people I've never met."

The bookseller didn't answer right away. He smiled instead, folded his arms across the counter, and thought about it as though she had asked him to recommend a wine for a very particular meal. Finally, he disappeared into the stacks and returned with a well-worn paperback.

"I don't know if this is the right book," he said, "but the best stories always convince us that other people's lives are worth caring about."

I've thought about that exchange ever since, not because I remember the novel—I've long since forgotten the title—but because I haven't forgotten the question.

Make me miss people I've never met.

Isn't that, in some strange way, what friendship is?

We spend much of our lives assuming that the people who matter most are the ones we already know. We cherish old friends, reminisce about college roommates, smile at photographs from weddings and vacations, and tell ourselves that we've been lucky to find our people. We have been. Long friendships are one of life's great privileges, and I would never suggest otherwise.

What fascinates me, however, are the friendships that don't exist yet. Somewhere, perhaps only a few miles from where you're sitting right now, is someone whose company you would genuinely enjoy. You would laugh at the same absurdities, recommend books to one another, lose entire afternoons over coffee, and discover that your life had quietly become larger simply because the other person was in it.

At this very moment, you are complete strangers.

That seems almost impossible when you stop to think about it. The people who eventually shape our lives almost always begin as anonymous figures moving through the same city, browsing the same bookstores, standing in the same grocery lines, attending the same lectures, or walking the same streets. Before they become the friends who know our stories, they are simply another face we don't recognize.

The older I've become, the more extraordinary that feels.

When we're young, friendship happens with astonishing ease because the world does the introductions for us. Schools gather hundreds of children into the same building every morning. Universities throw curious strangers together in classrooms and residence halls. Early careers fill our days with coworkers who gradually become confidants. Even parenthood, for those who experience it, creates its own social geography of soccer fields, school concerts, and birthday parties.

Then, almost without warning, life becomes more efficient.

We work from home. We order groceries through an app. We stream movies instead of going to the theater. We text instead of calling. We move through entire weeks accomplishing everything on our to-do list while speaking to remarkably few people we didn't already know.

Efficiency is a marvelous achievement, but it has one unfortunate side effect. It quietly removes the small moments where friendship has always begun.

No one schedules a lifelong friendship.

It usually starts because someone asked whether the seat beside you was taken. It begins when two people discover they're reaching for the same book, laughing at the same comment during a lecture, or lingering after everyone else has gone home. The friendship itself isn't planned. Only proximity is. Everything else grows from curiosity.

I sometimes wonder whether we've confused convenience with connection. Our lives have become wonderfully streamlined, but they have also become easier to navigate without interruption. We can move from breakfast until bedtime encountering almost no one who asks us an unexpected question or tells us an unexpected story. We have unprecedented access to information about the world and fewer opportunities to stumble into the world itself.

Travel has always reminded me of this, although perhaps not for the reason people expect. The places themselves are certainly memorable. I can still picture little cafés tucked into side streets in Paris, neighborhood plazas in Mexico where the evening seemed to arrive more slowly than it does anywhere else, and bookstores in London where every creaking wooden floor felt as though it had been collecting readers for centuries. Yet when I think about those journeys, the places and the people have become inseparable.

I remember the waiter who quietly ignored the menu and insisted that I try the dish his grandmother used to make. I remember the retired schoolteacher who spent half an hour explaining why she still carried a fountain pen instead of a ballpoint because, as she put it, "good thoughts deserve better handwriting." I remember the bookseller who refused to let me leave without buying a novel I'd never heard of because he was convinced it would become one of my favorites.

He was right.

None of those people knew they were becoming part of my story.

That's the wonderful thing about conversations. They have no idea what they're about to become.

We often think of travel as something that changes us because the scenery is different, but I suspect the scenery is only part of the equation. What really changes us is that we become more available to the world. We expect to ask questions. We expect to be surprised. We assume the people we meet might know something we don't. We become curious again, and curiosity has an extraordinary way of making the world feel populated instead of crowded.

Then we come home and forget that the same opportunity has been waiting for us all along.

The woman reading alone in your neighborhood café has an entire lifetime of stories you'll never hear if you assume she'd rather be left alone. The gentleman browsing the history section of your local bookstore may have spent forty years restoring old theaters or sailing across the Atlantic or teaching high school chemistry. The couple sitting beside you at the wine bar may have just returned from a country you've always wanted to visit.

You don't know.

That's precisely the point.

Interesting people become interesting because they remain interested. They resist the temptation to believe they already know enough people, enough places, or enough stories. They continue asking questions long after everyone else has become comfortable with assumptions.

I've begun to think that belonging works the same way.

Belonging isn't something we discover like buried treasure. It isn't a club that finally decides to let us in. More often, it's something we build one conversation at a time. Every invitation to dinner, every introduction between strangers, every lingering conversation after a lecture or concert adds another thread to a fabric that eventually becomes community.

Perhaps that's why Dorothy Society has never really been about travel, despite what many people assume. Travel is simply one expression of a larger philosophy. It's a reminder that life continues to reward curiosity, that reinvention has no expiration date, and that the most interesting chapter of your life is under no obligation to have happened already.

There is something deeply hopeful about believing that your future still contains people you cannot yet imagine missing.

One day you'll celebrate birthdays with someone whose name you don't know today. You'll exchange Christmas cards with someone you're currently walking past on the sidewalk without noticing. You'll raise a glass to a friendship that, at this moment, exists only as possibility.

Life has a remarkable habit of introducing us to exactly the people we didn't know we were waiting for.

The only requirement is that we keep showing up where conversations still have room to begin.