It has become my habit, as summer deepens, to exercise early in the morning when it is still cool. I head up the hill behind our house which, at its peak, offers a spectacular view out to the coastal range. On my way up I usually pass a woman who follows the same route at approximately the same time, in reverse. We exchange pleasantries—Nice weather…Stay cool…etc.—but we don’t stop moving.

A house is being built halfway up the hill. The owner was outside this morning and the woman stopped to ask him when he’d be moving in. I paused to hear his answer. The woman nodded across the street to me. “We pass each other every day,” she explained to the man.

Emotion plumed in me at her use of the word “we.” It delighted me. It pointed to the thing we have in common. She could have said, “I pass her every day,” reinforcing our separateness, but by using the word “we” she had brought us into a kind of relationship.

Through much of the rest of my walk I contemplated this interesting emotional shift wrought by a simple word choice. I thought about prefacing a comment to a stranger with other pronouns. You must…You should…You look…You are…You can…You can’t. Every “you” sentence I thought of that might be directed at a stranger seemed confrontational. What about “I” statements? I notice…I think…I want…I feel. These too, seemed intrusive, coming from an assumption that the listener should care about the speaker.

But “we” is a friendly pronoun for the way it assumes connection and equality. (I am sure this is debatable, so please dispute this if you see things differently!)

On the return leg of this morning’s walk the woman walker—whose name I do not know—and I passed each other again. This time we stopped to talk. We chatted about the horrific road construction at the bottom of the hill. We laughed. And when we went on our way I thought: We are a we, newly connected. One might say entangled.