Flying by the seat of my pants...

“For the love of God – just once ask 

her a [meaningful] question.”

-   David Brooks, Author 

During the forty-plus years of my working life (I’ll include the military here), I flew over two and a half million miles. Most of it began in my late thirties through my early seventies. A few times, I flew in the isolated bubble of business class, but for the most part, it was regular service.

 

The airtime led to hours of sitting beside people I didn’t know. This, in turn, led to many anonymous conversations. Anonymous because some of the most curious things are shared when talking to someone who knows they will never see you again.

 

My mother was a significant influence in my life. While a quiet and thoughtful woman, she loved people. When she met someone she didn’t know, learning about them was a top priority for her. She made people feel like they were the most important person in the world. I used to joke that my mother could strike up a conversation with a telephone pole and make it feel like its job had meaning.

 

I inherited her endless fascination with stories people tell about their lives. There was a television police drama in the 1960s called Naked City. Each episode ended with the tagline, “There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.”

 

As per the above 'tagline,'' I found, over hundreds of conversations, unique stories, none of which were precisely the same. 

 

Over the years, I developed a series of questions that helped me know whether there might be a potential conversation. Soft ball queries – easily modified depending on responses. 

 

·      “Are you heading home or heading out?”

·      “Are you traveling for business, pleasure, or family?” 

·      “What do you do for a living?”

·      “What got you interested in your field?”

·      “Is this the only work you have done?”

 

After all, one cannot simply say to one's seatmate, "So tell me about your life, Mr/Ms stranger." 

 

The tenor of the replies let me know whether to continue to gently probe or go to work. 

 

Most of the time, if contact was made, it only took listening and a little nudging to slip into my seatmates' minds and stories. It was like they were tired of newspaper reporting, waiting for something more meaningful than; where have you lived? What's your job? How many kids do you have? The endless list of sterile "…just the facts, ma'am/sir" chatter. They wanted to be heard. They wanted to be seen. 

 

I became a voyeur, partaking of uniquely cultivated lives and journeys. It is incredible the things people share. Sometimes, deep secrets, failures, regrets, hopes, fears, betrayals, adulteries, joys, and hopes. There isn't much I haven't heard in a darkened airline cabin at 35,000ft (10,668m). The list is long, but the contents of the journeys make each story unique.

One of the consistent things I found over the years after the "hi, how are you?" people have life issues and want to find a safe place to talk and share. It turns out that quiet conversations with a seatmate can often provide just that.

 

The takeaway…

There is a primal human need each of us has. It is the craving to feel relevant, to believe we have a place, that our lives have meaning. We want to be heard. Christ said, "He that hath an ear, let him hear." He wasn't talking about the weather, a 15-second meme on TikTok, or the day's latest news. He was saying, listen, pay attention, and focus on the message.

 

In today's American culture, there is much to distract us…much labeling and categorizing people, reducing them to one-dimensional caricatures. And yet…and yet, none of us is a caricature. We yearn to be understood and appreciated. 

 

David Brooks, in his provocative book, How to know a person, suggests there is no such thing as an ordinary person. “[There is] a Central truth about what human beings are: a person is a point of view. People don't see the world with their eyes. They see it with their entire life.” He says:

“I’m no longer content to ask, “What do you think about X?” Instead I ask, “How did you come to believe X?”…Similarly, I don’t ask people to tell me about their values; I say, “Tell me about the person who shaped your values most.”

 

This is not complicated, nor does it require special training. It is the operational part of doing unto others what we want others to do to (for) us. It simply requires showing genuine interest in another person's story, which opens them up to reciprocate, to show a genuine interest in our story. Isn’t that what each of us wants? Isn’t that what helps to give our lives meaning?

 

It just starts with a bit of curiosity. It can be awkward initially, but that's what practice is for.

 

My practice? Like so many other things in my life, has come by the seat of my pants.

 

ted