People Watching

I love to watch people. I recently took a trip to Alaska. On the flight from PHX to Seattle there was a group of 8 women in front of us. I gathered they had been to PHX for some kind of work seminar. There was such a sense of friendship between them. It was like they really *knew* each other, strengths as well as weaknesses and they really liked each other. I wasn't jealous but I had a longing to be a part of a group like that. A part of a group of people who really know me, all about me, and still love me, still like me, still want to be a part of my life, a group of people who trust me enough to let me know all those things about them. It seems like I often expend a lot of energy keeping people from getting to know me because past experience tells me that it is just too painful when they reject you and leave.

When we were at the fishing lodge there was a group of 5 guys on a trip there, all a part of law firm. The energy between them was totally different than that between the women on the plane. I watched them and tried to imagine what their wives were like, what kind of family they had. I heard one guy mention a place he would never return to because he didn't feel like his child was welcome there, that told me a lot about him. There was another interchange between 2 of the guys and it was like one had a secret and was almost baiting the other guy who wanted to know what the secret was. It was so different with the women where one could just point to a page in a magazine and they would all bust up laughing because they all knew the secret, it didn't even have to be mentioned.

One last thought from the trip - When we left Seattle for Sitka it was totally overcast, not long after take off we were flying in sunshine, when we got to Sitka it was totally overcast again. It made me kind of think of life and realize that there is always sun somewhere, sometimes you just have to keep climbing to get above the clouds to find it.