I've been pondering on life recently, as I border the realm of adulthood. There are roughly seven and a half billion people on this Earth. 7.5 billion minds, 7.5 billion lives, 7.5 billion stories. And yet, I will only get to hear a small fraction of them. In fact, there is no way that I could hear everybody's stories. Even if your life story took just one minute to tell, it would still take me 14,269.35 years to hear everyone's. So let's call it 14,000 years for simplicity.

If I lived for 100 years and listened to people's stories for every minute of my life, I would still only know 1.4% of people on this Earth.

With that in mind, I have a new mission in life. It is this: To hear as many as I possibly can. And to never, ever say no to a story.

Humans have such an incredible power to connect to others. We, some more than others, have the gift of empathy. We can relate to each other, learn from observation and heal one another with words. Reaching out and listening to others, talking about yourself, getting to know people - these are things in-built in our core systems and these are skills which make us such a unique and diverse species.

In the 21st Century, this diverseness and ability to speak up about our own views and opinions is seemingly also what has divided us and what continues to divide us. People are so caught up in their own stories, they forget that every single person is running the same course. We cannot possibly hope to truly know everyone on this Earth. But it is so important that we at least value the lives we do know.

So I am going to try something. After reading this, post a sentence on social media and tag it with the hashtag #HelloWorld. Make it a sentence to sum-up who you are. It could be a sentence which describes your hobbies, your job, your interests. Or an interesting fact, or your eye colour! Anything you like.

I want to get to know as many people on this Earth as I can and in this age, with the Internet being such a prominent force in our lives, there is no better time to begin.

My sentence is this: #HelloWorld. My name is Hannah and I am an eccentric.