Coffee at the station

During the last year of my PhD, my world became very small.

There were pages to write, papers to finish, comments from my supervisor to address. The work required a kind of retreat: long hours alone, thinking, writing, closing chapters that had been open for years. Socially, it was a quieter time. I saw fewer people. Conferences, spontaneous coffees, the casual conversations that often follow academic events, all of that slowly faded into the background.

It was a necessary phase. A period of turning inward to finish something that mattered.

But when the thesis finally ended, something else began to reopen.

Looking for a postdoc pushed me back into the world. I started sending emails to people I didn’t know: researchers, people in organizations, individuals whose work had caught my attention.

The emails usually began the same way:

Hello, we don’t know each other, but I’ve been reading about your work and I would love to hear more about what you do.

From there, sometimes, came a coffee.

Some of these meetings were online. Others happened in small cafés around Brussels. And almost every time, just before going, I had the same thought: What am I doing? Why did I decide to meet someone I’ve never met before?

There is always a small resistance before these encounters. A kind of inertia.

And yet, most of the time, they turn out to be wonderful.

Out of ten meetings, maybe eight became genuinely meaningful conversations. Not necessarily about projects or collaborations, but about work, curiosity, doubts, daily life, and sometimes things far beyond professional identities.

What surprised me most is how relieved and happy people often seemed that the meeting had no clear objective.

I wasn’t there to pitch an idea or secure a partnership. I simply introduced myself: I had finished my PhD, I was exploring what might come next, and something in their path had made me curious. Then I asked them to tell their story.

In a world where many interactions are driven by efficiency and outcomes, opening a conversation without a specific goal feels almost unusual. But it also creates a different kind of space: one where curiosity can breathe.

Sometimes nothing concrete comes out of these meetings. No collaboration, no project, no follow-up. But that’s not really the point.

I like to think about encounters using the image of a train. In life, people step into our train at different moments. Some stay for a long journey. Others for only a few stops.

And sometimes we simply meet on the platform.

These coffees feel like that: a pause at a station. Two people standing on the same platform for a moment, sharing a conversation. Maybe one day we will travel in the same direction. Maybe not.

But we’ve met.

And if our paths cross again, the distance between strangers has already disappeared.

In a time where many of us move quickly from task to task, there is something quietly radical about creating moments like these, moments where the only agenda is curiosity.

Sometimes all it takes is a simple message:

Hello. We don’t know each other, but I’d love to hear your story.