There is something deeply uninhibiting about traveling. I always seem to have fantastic conversations when I talk to the person sitting next to me on planes. On this particular plane trip, I decided that I would start a conversation with whoever sat down next to me. It seemed as though the risk of missing a satisfying chat was much greater than the risk of having a bad conversation.

I’ve found that the best way of starting conversations on planes is to complain about how full the flight is. This always works, because flights are always packed to the brim and sometimes past the brim. In this instance, I got creative and complained about the cold temperature on the plane instead.

Of course, you have to immediately shift the conversation to something positive, because who wants to spend hours stuck on a plane doing nothing but complaining? As it turned out (and it inevitably seems to turn out this way), the person sitting next to me had a tremendously interesting life to talk about, since she  had just moved from Israel with her husband two months before and had gotten her dream job, and on top of that she was pregnant with her first child. No lack of conversational material here.

I really believe that if people around here chatted as easily as we do on planes, we would be a noticeably happier society.