Beauty and Acceptance

Beauty

I sat on a plane today working with the spirit of 'being friendly.'

A woman sat next to me, Marcy, and as we prepared for takeoff, she shared snippets of her life.

Her courageous heart became evident as she outlined details of her challenges and struggles.

She surmounted her fears to return to college at 50 years-old with the goal of becoming a registered nurse.

Victorious in that, she continued her ascent to head nurse just three months after graduation.

She then described details of her experience in working with Alzheimer patients.

She revealed she is now retired.

She divulged her fears of death.

She shared heartfelt emotions about her father, her mother, her sisters, her classmates, her husband, her grandmother and her daughters.

God is an essential part of her universe.

In all of this, she showed me the limits of her belief systems.

One of her belief systems got knocked on its head, creating a brush with shame.

She had unintentionally offended someone in a foreign country with a lack of knowledge about their customs. She described the steps she took to process her feelings of shame and reconcile the internal conflict she felt.

And an hour and 40 minutes later, as the plane began its descent, she said the most curious thing.

"Thank you. I enjoyed talking with you. You're an interesting person."

And I smiled when she said this because she never noticed - I barely mentioned anything at all about myself, and yet she found me interesting.

When she shared her full name with me with great deliberation, it became clear. She wanted me to remember her.
But, there was only one noteworthy feature about me in this interaction for her to remember in return.

I was someone who maintained an open and safe space for her to share anything and everything she wanted to about herself.

And in every lapse of conversation, I built bridges which connected her core values back to the content she shared.

And I answered the few questions she directed my way creatively, building interfaces with her - in ways where she responded to her feelings of safety and validation by sharing more about her understanding of the world.

She thought she spent time getting to know me when in reality, all I did was take steps into her world by building bridges of curiosity and acceptance.

I viewed this time as an opportunity for me to practice expressing myself by showing her I heard her, I understood her and that I was present and supportive of her expression of being.

I did this by artfully exposing her understanding of life back to her.

I practiced reflecting the beauty I saw in her so she could see herself with more clarity.

And in this, I expressed naturally, authentic me holding a space of loving acceptance of all she shared about her universe and her cosmology.

Friendly as I define it - energetic, emotional, physical and mental acceptance of that shared from another's universe in a gentle, supporting manner.

In this definition, she never suspected the spaces where my belief systems conflicted with hers.

And, in this definition of friendly, my personal beliefs and preferences did not fire up because I was merely exploring the emotional, physical, mental and energetic expression which was Marcy at that moment in time.

Interacting with her world, her cosmology and her understanding of life on her terms.

Freely moving in her spaces, whatever she cared to express.

And in this, I learned so much.

I send gratitude to Marcy, a gentle, loving human being, who taught me beautiful lessons as we flew across the sky sharing time and space.