My wife and I had dinner this past week with a couple who we had met recently. This was something that we hadn’t done for several years.

Why is it unusual? One reason is we are introverts. We do enjoy meeting people in small gatherings, but you will rarely find us in settings where there are lots of folks. We don’t have the opportunity to meet many new people, and we don’t make much of an effort to do so. We also live in a rural setting. It is easy for us to go several days without speaking with anyone other than each other. We’re not hermits. We have children, grandchildren, and close friends who we see often. We volunteer in nearby communities and attend a local exercise class where we met our new friends.

It was good to spend an evening with some genuinely nice people who we knew nothing about. We shared our story and listened with interest to theirs. We are all at a point in our lives where there are more milestones behind us than ahead. The stories were much more complete than when we met people in our younger days, and this made them more satisfying to me.