To Each His Own

A group of people can go through the same thing under the same conditions and each come away with their own version of what happened.

I was reminded of this as we traveled from Houston to Italy. The first day was long. A nine hour flight, a 4 1/2 hour layover, another 2 1/2 hour flight and a 1 1/2 hour drive. I hadn’t thought much about it mostly because I hadn’t even had time to calculate all of it prior to arriving at the airport.

Griffin had been thinking about how long this travel day was going to be for a while and his description of what was to come sounded like we were gearing up for battle and that if we were lucky, we may all survive. He is naturally funny even when he isn’t trying to be and the drama throughout the day kept me laughing pretty hard.

Remi was the most flexible of all of us and definitely complained the least. It didn’t suck for her enough to say anything until the end of the 4 1/2 hour lay over in Frankfort.

I was flat pissed off at the woman in front of me during the 9 hour flight. She wasn’t friendly, asked us to stop talking at 8pm so that she could sleep and then proceeded to snore so loud that our entire section of the plane was awake, suffering right along side me. The snoring was something like I had never heard before. It permeated my ear plugs so much that I kept checking to see if they had fallen out. Towards the end of the flight while all of the passengers were looking at her with obvious frustration, I consciously decided to try to look at her with compassion. I think I was able to do that for approximately 2 seconds.

The Lady who snored had a completely different experience. She ate all of the meals, watched some TV and then slept like a baby. She had no idea that she had kept the rest of the plane awake all night. I wanted her to apologize. I wanted her to acknowledge what had happened. How could she? she didn’t experience what we had.

My take away is this:

Who are we to judge someone’s reaction to any experience? The same people can be doing the same thing and experiencing something totally different.

 Griffin’s Hollywood worthy drama reflected what he was experiencing. 

Remi’s willingness to let him have the seat with more leg room and be mostly content during our travels was reflective of her experience. It was a long day, but not torture. 

The lady who snored was just fine because she didn’t experience herself.

I watched the movie Eat, Love, Pray and proceeded to reenact the Eat portion of the movie. I plowed through whatever was put in front of me from door to door, hoping I would naturally shift to the Pray portion once we reached our destination.

To each his own. And that is just fine by me. 

Sit back and enjoy the movie.

XX,

MG

TEA IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD