I was sprinting through the airport, sweating like I was in a CrossFit heat instead of a terminal, desperate to make a tight connection. It was one of those travel days where I hadn’t planned ahead—no snacks, no time—assuming I’d grab something during my layover. Rookie mistake. A delay killed that plan, and now I was light-headed, starving, and racing the clock.
As I finally neared my gate, I spotted a tiny kiosk with prepackaged meals and grabbed a Pad Thai without even glancing at the fine print warning: spicy. Priority boarding got me onto the plane quickly, and I inhaled the meal like it was my last. I ate it so fast I barely registered the heat—until it punched me in the face. Within seconds, beads of sweat gathered at my hairline, my nose started running, and I was frantically dabbing at myself with a napkin like a woman coming undone.
That’s when a grandmotherly woman appeared beside me, pointing at the middle seat.
“That’s me,” she said.
I jumped up to let her in and immediately resumed fighting my bodily rebellion. The spice was finally starting to settle when I could feel her eyes studying me. And then, without hesitation, she reached over, gently took my hand, and squeezed it.
“Honey,” she said softly, “I used to be afraid of flying too. It’s going to be okay.”
I opened my mouth to correct her—to explain that the only thing I was afraid of was my Szechwan Spicy Tofu Pad Thai coming back up during takeoff. But something in me stopped. I didn’t want to break the spell of that unexpected comfort. So instead, I just said, “Thank you.”
And for a few seconds, I let myself sink into a kindness I didn’t technically “deserve.” I’m not afraid of flying. Not even close. But she thought I was, and in her misreading, she offered something I didn’t realize I needed: a moment of pure, human warmth.
I thought about that moment long after the flight. This stranger had touched my hand for all of three seconds, and it stuck with me longer than half the conversations I’d had that week. It reminded me of a phrase I recently stumbled across in The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows—a book that names the feelings we don’t know how to articulate but instantly recognize when we see them.
The term is Incidental Contact High.
“An innocuous touch by someone just doing their job—a barber, yoga instructor, or friendly waitress—that you find more meaningful than you’d like to admit; a feeling of connection so stupidly simple it makes you wonder if aspiring novelists would be better off just offering people a hug.”
That definition hit me like that woman’s hand on mine—unexpected, undeserved, and exactly what I needed.
Because that’s what happened on that plane: a tiny, accidental moment of human connection that somehow rearranged my emotional chemistry. Not because it was profound or dramatic, but because it was simple. Because it was human. Because it reminded me, in the middle of my self-imposed chaos, that kindness doesn’t have to be orchestrated or earned to matter.
The more I thought about that woman on the plane, the more it struck me how often we move through the world like we’re the only ones in it—heads down, moving fast, trying to outrun our own obligations and irritations. We glide past people without really seeing them, barely registering the hundreds of tiny collisions we have every single day. Not the dramatic, life-altering kind of collisions—just the subtle emotional bumps and nudges that leave traces we don’t bother to examine. A sigh in a checkout line. A clipped tone in a meeting. A smile that hits a little deeper than it should. A stranger’s hand on yours because she thinks you’re afraid of flying.
These are the small, almost invisible impacts that shape us far more than we admit. We like to think we’re impervious, self-contained, above it all. But human beings aren’t sealed systems—we absorb each other. We catch moods like colds. We pick up tension like static. We inhale someone’s warmth, and it shifts something inside us, even if we don’t know why.
And most of the time, we don’t even notice it happening. We are unconscious participants in each other’s stories, influencing and being influenced in ways we never stop to consider. We leave dents we never see. We soothe hurts we never realize we touched. We spark hope by accident. We cause harm without intention. We are constantly crashing into one another and pretending it’s nothing.
But every now and then, something snaps us awake. A gesture lands in the right place at the right moment. And in that moment, you remember that connection doesn’t have to be earned or orchestrated or logical to matter. It just has to be real.
That’s the awakening. The moment we remember that none of us move through this world untouched or untouching. That even in our busiest, most self-absorbed moments, our presence is shaping someone else’s reality. And when that realization hits you—when you finally see the quiet power you wield—it becomes impossible to pretend your impact is incidental.
We tend to dismiss these micro-moments because they feel insignificant. But maybe the insignificant moments are the whole point. Maybe the world isn’t moved by grand gestures or sweeping transformations. Maybe it’s moved by a thousand tiny touches—most of which the giver never knows mattered.
And maybe the real opportunity isn’t to engineer those moments but to notice them. To stay awake enough to realize when someone has nudged us back into alignment. To be conscious enough of our own presence that we stop sleepwalking through the lives we bump into. We don’t have to be profound to be powerful. We just have to stop pretending our impact is neutral.
That woman didn’t change my life. But she changed my day. And sometimes that’s the difference between spiraling and steady. Sometimes that’s the disruption.
The truth is, we are affecting each other constantly—through glances, tone, presence, energy—and pretending we’re not. But disrupters don’t get to claim ignorance. Disrupters move through the world awake. Aware. Intentional.
And maybe that’s the only thing we truly control: the wake we leave behind. The warmth we offer without needing a reason. The brief moment when we choose to be fully human with one another—accidentally or not. The kind of moment that becomes someone else’s incidental contact high.
