Human Connection in Leadership Resilience: The Corridor

On silence, strangers, and what we have quietly given away

Human connection in leadership resilience is often explained through theory, but sometimes it is best understood through a lived moment. This story keeps its human shape, while the reflection below offers a leadership and resilience lens.

PERSONAL ESSAY
The Corridor

I was standing in a packed train in France, asking people to let me pass. Nobody moved. Nobody heard me. And somewhere in that absurd, lonely moment, thirty years of travel came flooding back.

ON SILENCE, STRANGERS, AND WHAT WE HAVE QUIETLY GIVEN AWAY

The train was somewhere between Lyon and Paris, packed the way only French intercity trains can be — that particular species of cheerful overcrowding where strangers press together in corridors with their luggage and their dignity and somehow everyone pretends this is fine. I needed to get through. My station was next. I said excusez-moi, clearly enough, I thought. Politely. Even with a smile I could feel but they could not see.

Nobody moved.

I tried again. Still nothing. Not rudeness — not exactly. More like absence. A wall of human beings, each sealed inside their own private world, a white cord trailing from each ear like the thread of some modern mythology. I stood there for a long moment, genuinely uncertain. Was I speaking? Yes. Were they sleeping? No. Were we in the same reality? That, I was less sure about.

It was absurd and funny and a little sad. And it sent me somewhere I hadn’t expected to go: thirty years back down the road.

The hitchhiker from somewhere I’ve forgotten

I have logged more miles than I can count. Flights, trains, buses, ferries, the occasional borrowed bicycle. I have lived out of a bag for weeks at a time in a way that stops feeling like travel and starts feeling like a particular form of consciousness — heightened, porous, open to accident.

And the accidents were the point.

There was the hitchhiker I picked up on a road in southern Germany in the early 1990s — a philosophy student going nowhere in particular, or perhaps everywhere in particular, which is the same thing when you are twenty-three. We talked for two hours. I cannot remember his name. I remember everything he said about solitude and ambition and the particular loneliness of feeling like you are running ahead of yourself. I have thought about that conversation, genuinely, in the decades since.

There was the woman on a night train who turned out to be a nurse returning from a month working in refugee camps. She said one thing I have never forgotten: The people who recover fastest are always the ones who stay curious about the person next to them. I did not know then that this was resilience research. I know now.

There were arguments about politics, confessions of loneliness, impromptu invitations, stories that went nowhere and stories that changed the direction of a day, a week, a year. The raw material of a life examined.

We were bored, in those days. Magnificently, productively, creatively bored. And in the space that boredom opened, other people walked in.

None of this was exceptional. It was what travel was — a series of small, unplanned encounters with human beings you would never otherwise meet, in conditions of mild discomfort or idleness that made you unusually open to them. The long wait at the border crossing. The train that was late. The ferry that didn’t run. The four hours with nothing to do except look out of a window and notice that there was a person sitting across from you who had a life you knew nothing about.

We were bored, in those days. Magnificently, productively, creatively bored. And in the space that boredom opened, other people walked in.

What the neuroscientists discovered

I want to be careful here, because I am not writing a self-help article and I am not interested in nostalgia as a moral position. The past was not simply better. But something has changed, and the science is now catching up with what anyone who has travelled across several decades can feel in their body.

Nicholas Epley and Juliana Schroeder at the University of Chicago spent years studying what happens when commuters on trains and buses actually talk to the strangers sitting next to them. The results were almost comically counter-intuitive. People predicted they would find solitude more pleasant than conversation. They were, reliably, wrong. Commuters who connected with a stranger reported a significantly more positive experience than those who kept to themselves — happier, more energised, more informed, even on a commute they had made a hundred times before.

THE RESEARCH

Epley and Schroeder call the phenomenon ‘undersociality’ — we are systematically less social than would be good for us, because we consistently overestimate how awkward connection will be and underestimate how much the stranger next to us also wants it. A separate study found that when participants had access to their phones while waiting with a group of strangers, they socialised less and reported a worse experience — and the phones conferred no detectable benefit, even in the awkward first minutes.

We have, it turns out, miscalibrated mental models about strangers. We assume they want to be left alone. They don’t — or at least, not nearly as much as we think. But with a phone in hand, we never find out. The discomfort that might have pushed us to say hello is immediately soothed by the scroll. The moment passes. The stranger remains a stranger.

Then there is the question of boredom itself — of Langeweile, to use the German word I find more beautiful and more precise. Lange Weile: long time. The experience of time stretching out ahead of you with nothing to fill it.

Neuroscientists studying what happens in the brain during idle, unstructured time have discovered something remarkable. When we are not focused on any external task, a network of brain regions called the Default Mode Network becomes active. This is the brain’s creative compost: the system that turns over ideas beneath the surface, forges unexpected connections between memories, generates insights we could not have manufactured through focused effort. The shower insight. The walk that solved the problem. The half-asleep thought that became the project. These are not accidents. They are the Default Mode Network doing exactly what it evolved to do — but only when we give it the silence to do so.

THE RESEARCH

A 2014 study found that participants who were bored before a creative task produced significantly more imaginative solutions than those who were not. A 2022 study in Molecular Psychiatry established for the first time a causal — not merely correlational — link between default network activity and creative thought, using direct electrical stimulation during awake brain surgery. Boredom is not a malfunction. It is a feature. One we are systematically extinguishing.

Every time we reach for our phones in a moment of stillness — on the train, in the queue, in the three seconds between putting the coffee on and the kettle boiling — we are denying the Default Mode Network the silence it needs. We are filling the compost bin with concrete. We are, slowly and without noticing, making ourselves less creative, less emotionally regulated, and less resilient.

Back in the corridor

I did eventually get through, on that French train. Someone glanced up, noticed my physical presence in a way that seemed almost startled — as if I had materialised from another dimension — and shuffled sideways. I made my stop. I stood on the platform watching the train pull away, and I felt something I can only describe as a gentle grief.

Not for the inconvenience. For the loss of something I can’t name precisely — a texture of life that used to exist in these in-between spaces. The corridor, the waiting room, the delayed departure, the long platform. Spaces that used to be socially alive, electrically possible, full of the low-grade, open-ended possibility that something might happen, someone might speak, something might begin.

I am not naive about this. I know social media connects people who would never have found each other. I know earbuds can mean someone is working through grief or chronic pain, and the music is medicine. I know the phone is also a tool of survival for people navigating hostile environments where a conversation with a stranger would not be safe. These things are real.

But I also know what I have lost. And I know, now, that the research confirms what the loss feels like.

Resilience is not built in isolation. It is built in the corridor, in the delay, in the conversation you weren’t expecting to have.

Resilience — real resilience, the kind built over a lifetime — comes substantially from two sources that the phone disrupts: other people, and solitude. Not one or the other. Both. The woman on the night train, and the long hours before she sat down when I stared out the window and let my mind run. The hitchhiker on the German road, and the silence of the journey before I stopped.

The research is unambiguous that weak ties — brief encounters with strangers and acquaintances — are significant contributors to wellbeing, creativity, and a sense of belonging to something larger than our immediate circle. And the research is equally unambiguous that the brain requires genuine idle time to integrate experience, generate insight, and regulate emotion. We are engineering both of these things out of our lives, moment by moment, swipe by swipe, completely voluntarily, and with tremendous skill.

What I am not saying

I am not saying put down your phone. That is not something a serious person would write, or a thoughtful person would need to read.

I am saying something more interesting and harder: that serendipity is a survival skill. That boredom is a form of nutrition. That the stranger in the corridor — the one you didn’t speak to because you were listening to a podcast — might have carried a sentence that would have lived in you for thirty years.

I am saying that when I look back across the decades of travel that have shaped my thinking, my work, my understanding of the world and of myself, it is not the seminars or the curated experiences that I remember most fiercely. It is the unplanned ones. The hitched rides. The missed trains that led somewhere better. The person who sat down across from me and turned out to be thinking about the same thing I had been thinking about alone for months.

I am saying there is a whole category of encounter, a whole mode of human experience, that requires only two things: that you be present in your body, and that your mind have room to be surprised.

We used to travel with those conditions met by default. Now we have to choose them, deliberately, against the grain of everything around us. That is not an impossible choice. But it is a choice that has to be made consciously, every time. Every platform. Every corridor. Every long wait that turns out, if you let it, to be something else entirely.

The next time you are on a train and someone asks you to move, you will probably hear them. That is enough, for now. A beginning.

— Bärbel Wetenkamp

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