I You He She It , We You They

Everybody’s favorite word is I.

On my final flight home after a speedy three weeks on the road I worked my way down the aisle on a Southwest flight. I scanned the rows of seats desperately in need of something at the front of the plane. Last on and first out. Middle seats are fine if they’re in the first few rows. Sqeezing between two strangers is worth the chance to deplane quickly.

Exhausted and frayed from the week, I plopped down into a middle seat. The man in the aisle seat could see right away I was going home. The look of surrender on my face made a perfect audience for what was to be his one-hour-thirteen-minute monologue that started ended and middled with the word I.

His hair was colored a nice tawney brown. He had a mouth full of veneers and a smooth knit shirt with a collar and three buttons down the front. Perfect for detailing the hard earned physique he was proud of. He wasn’t particularly big but big enough to be considered a real man. His hands were warm, I knew because he shook mine. I guessed he was in his fifties. He was eager and ready to engage. He sat with his arms crossed trying to contain himself but the suspense was just too much for him to bear.

“What do you do?” he asked and before I could exhale an answer he volunteered his resume.

“I’m” there’s that I word “retired. Well, I’m recently retired but before that I was in fashion. I loved the business and I did very well. I loved it. I had two offices, one in Hong Kong and one in New York. I just loved it and now I’m retired. Well I’m recently retired. But who knows what I’ll be doing next. I don’t know. I’m not worried about it. I just got married and I have a lovely wife. She’s younger than me and I think she wants a baby. I already have two kids…” and it went on.

My responses were limited to head nodding and unrecognizable noises that functioned as confirmations of what he was saying.

Twenty minutes in and he finally interrupted himself.

“You seem like a spitfire.” I have no idea how he came to that. I had barely shown signs of life. “Let me ask you something.”

Oh goody it’s going to turn into a dialogue. I was in suspense.

“If you had a benefactor, and you had three million dollars tomorrow, what would you do with it?” Great question I thought. This is going to be fun. I pondered for a minute and he crossed his arms trying to be patient. But again the waiting was too much for him to handle.

“…because I don’t know what I would do. Hmmm. Let me think. I know. I’d…”

My eyes dropped to my Heinekin that had recently been delivered by a cheery but distracted flight attendant.

What was I thinking? You might guess that I was thinking the following:

“This guy is killing me. Why won’t he shut up? Egotist. I, I, fricken I. Dude, if you want to monologue get a therapist. Why are you even talking to me? Wouldn’t it be easier to just talk to a mirror? What the F%$# time is it?”

If this was your guess you are partially right. I started like this but ended in a different place. I started with tension in my face, my head pushed to the back of the chair and a grin-and-bear-it attitude. But then I tried something else.

Lately I’ve been experimenting with changing my experience of things by making a decision to change my attitude and my own dialogue, my inner one. It’s worked elegantly and it’s creeping into all parts of my life. In the last year I adhered to one rule: no complaining. It’s been great. No complaining actually made me feel like not complaining. And as a result my husband isn’t as exhausted by me, my job is more fun and my friendships are easier to maintain. So I tried a similar approach to this guy on the plane. But with a little different strategy.

I decided to feel less like an aggravated passenger just muscling my way to the finish line and more like a Chaplain. A listener with an open heart. And my inner dialogue went from “this guy’s killing me” to something much easier on the senses.

I dropped the expectation that I would contribute to the conversation verbally, and I just decided to listen. I listed without discrediting or judging his eagerness to share his life with me. And that’s when things changed. My head relaxed off the seatback, I enjoyed the rest of my beer and I let him rant about whatever he wanted without guiding the conversation at all.

In the end my thought was that he was not an obnoxious egotist but a man who was proud of his work and of his children and a man who was ready to share himself quickly and easily with anyone who’s curious. That he lived honestly and was outwardly loving toward the people who were important to him in his life. And I learned that he was ready for more people to fill his new free retirement schedule. I saw a man who was enthusiastic and willing to talk about the good in anything even in the people who had given him grief in his life. And most importantly, I saw in myself the ability to see the good in someone who minutes earlier could have just been another person tugging on my exhausted ear. I opened my heart and that felt great. And that’s something I am going to try again and again until it’s easy. Be a Chaplain and the most important word becomes you.