People: (e)Lisa

I have met nothing but incredible people so far. I keep telling myself that like attracts like, but deep down I know I'm just lucky. Or it could be that I have good taste--discerning.

I hope to give you a little insight into what makes these people so great.

To begin with, the first person I met, while still on the plane, Lisa.

It was the kind of conversation that could have been the basis for a movie, one with a lot of flashbacks. The kind of conversation from which you don't expect much but in the end provides confirmation of the seemingly endless potential we have to connect with our fellow humans.

In fact, it played out like a lot of my music: slow at first, building, climax, denouement.

It started out with her by the window, an older Indian woman in the middle, and me approaching the aisle seat. Just before I sit down, the Indian woman asked if I would mind switching with her due to her bad knee. The first thing that came to my mind was "Age before beauty", which fortunately was interrupted on its way to my mouth.

The point of small talk is to pave the way to big talk. Il faut quand même quelques points de repères. And I learned through small talk that she was from Seattle on her way to visit her youngest daughter who was studying in Dijon. So far, pretty normal. And I learned that they had quite the trip planned to the extent that they knew what city they were going to be in each night. Clearly, not my kind of people. And yet, the conversation floated along like a river that doesn't yet know that it's headed towards the sea.

Finally, it comes out: she had divorced her husband a year ago and was in the middle of a midlife transition--I would hardly call it a crisis but it certainly could have been. Transitions don't have to be crises; they can also be opportunities. And she had taken the opportunity to work in a school, helping out in the special education class, and was looking for ways to combine her talents with her interests.

I told her about things like Reiki...and Burning Man...although I would think the former to be more helpful and more idiomatic for her.

And then somewhere along the way I made a connection. Earlier, I was doing a crossword and listening to some businessmen talk about...well...business, and I realized that all people, to some extent, have a need to solve problems. Whatever job we do, we are asked to solve problems--problems of varying sizes. We all have our preference as to the size and amount. Being a composer, living the lifestyle, I'm inundated with both the creating and the solving of problems. [Interesting side note: I might make more money solving other people's problems.] For Lisa to work with special children, she had to use her ingenuity and people skills to determine how to communicate and work with each child.

I've had the image of a cork in the sea in my head recently. I realized that I am sometimes not even in the sea but in the air, throwing myself into the void knowing that I'll float when I come back down. It's in these moments of certain incertainty that I see through the cracks in the façade of my conception of life and start to see it for what it is: inconceivable.