Page 65 - https://ia800806.us.archive.org/12/items/mwk-eng-book/Leading-a-Spiritual-Life.pdf

Making Friends out of

Strangers

Develop genuine love for others in your heart and then others
cannot but love you in return.

eople, normally preoccupied with their family
Pmembers and a small circle of friends, do not
generally want to become familiar with strangers; they
take strangers to be ‘others’. This kind of thinking
is based simply on suppositions about others –
and sometimes such suppositions are unfounded.
Experience shows that it is perfectly possible to make
friends out of strangers.
Swami Rama Tirath (1873 – 1906) a man of
considerable education, decided in the last decade of
the nineteenth century to visit the USA, in spite of
not having enough money to finance his stay there
and in spite of there being no Indians to receive him
on American soil. After a long sea voyage, he reached
the American coast, where he disembarked along with
the other passengers. There were many Americans who
had come to receive their friends and relatives at the
port, but Swami Ram Tirath eventually found himself
walking all alone in a corner of the port. An American,

64