Curiosity beats Judgement

One day, many years ago, I was sitting in the old departure area of the Calgary Airport, waiting to board a WestJet flight. 

For anyone who hasn’t been there, imagine a playground on steroids. There are many oversized noisy spinning things that are a desperate attempt to keep bored and overtired kids moderately engaged for an hour or two. There’s also a candy kiosk. 

That’s an awesome combination. 

I was also overtired, bored, indulging in candy, and anxious to get home. 

I caught myself looking at the people seated across from me, and these were the words I heard in my head:

“That is the ugliest shirt I have ever seen.”

“Why the hell would anyone wear pants that tight?”

“What a stupid book, I can’t believe she’s reading that.”

I went down the line of travellers and insulted each one. In my head, sure, but it was still out there in the universe.

I caught myself after the fourth or fifth one, and I thought to myself, Oh My God why are you like this? Why are you doing this? 

I decided to go back down the line, take a deep breath, and just observe. 

“That shirt is orange.”

“Those pants are black.”

“That book has a blue spine.”

Observations that could be defined as completely objective. Descriptive. Not Judgemental. 

I instantly felt a sense of relaxation. The deep breath helped, but being non judgmental helped too. If I could do it for them, could I do it for myself? 

At some point, if we’re lucky, we are able to observe our choices and the impacts on our lives. 

Not just experience them, that’s a given. 

Something more than an awareness of them. Something less than an embodiment of them. 

We get to have an outsider point of view, the observer that is objective while being aware of being the subject. 

At one point in my adulthood, I had three female friends who were not friends with each other, so they never met, we were never together at the same time. I rarely saw or spoke to them in temporal proximity, it was just the way it was. However, in this one particular week I saw two of them and spoke with the third, and it hit me how similar they all were. 

They were all mean. Bitter, mean, gruff, hard. The kind of women some people think of as strong. The kind of women that on the outside, are caring, independent, intelligent. Two were in health care professions, one was very involved in charities. 

I was confused. These were my friends. 

Wait - These women were my friends?? 

Did they see me like that??

How and why was I attracted to this type of woman for friendships? 

When did I learn that caustic and sarcastic meant funny? When did I start to believe that hard meant strong? Had I previously believed that kindness and sensitivity was too soft, too weak?

Who else was raised with the old maxims “I’ll give you something to cry about” and “Nobody ever said life was fair” and then ended up with people who didn’t mind making people cry and couldn’t care less about fair?

I didn’t have a lot of girlfriends in my 20’s and 30’s, and now I wonder if that’s why - that I was concurrently repulsed by softness and afraid of hardness. There was no woman who could be exactly in the middle of that range.  

If my earliest exposures to women and girls was not full of softness and kindness, or if my own sensitivity was interpreted as weak, then maybe I didn’t know how to be friends with this kind of person. 

My observer brain asked me these questions, and then sat around and watched for about 10 years while I tried to figure it out. She’s still watching now. 

My mother was a hard woman, and a soft woman. She was strong, and she was weak. She fought for us, but not for herself. She stood up for her community, and bowed under the weight of family expectations. She was an optimist. She was a defeatist. The saddest thing I ever heard her say was ‘Why should I quit smoking if I’m still going to have cravings in ten years?’. 

Being alive in ten years wasn’t a good enough reason. She couldn’t justify saving her own damn life. 

I have five sisters, and we are all as equally strong as we are soft. We fight for our values, we cry for our failures, we sob at the state of the world, we plant seeds of courage and hope. 

I also have newer friends now, who are as adept at kindness as they are at humour. Women who exude a softness that is remarked upon by strangers, women who are warm and giving, who are supportive and willing to be supported (a true sign of strength).

I know funny people who never punch down. I know generous people who will give away their most precious resource, time. I know people who have so much compassion for others their hearts routinely break, only to be stitched back together with the strongest bond, love. 

I observe how I have grown by knowing these people, by not being afraid of the softness - mine or theirs.

I have found that it is possible to balance softness and strength, to forego judgment for curiosity. 

I hope my old friends have too.