Human In Disarray: Midway Airport Chicago

Before Christmas one year, I was waiting at Midway Airport at a Southwest Airlines gate for my ten-year-old grandson to arrive from Phoenix. He had decided he was going to spend the holiday with us and amazingly, his parents had agreed! David, my husband, was in the car park outside, waiting for my phone to signal him to begin circling the terminal. Suddenly, my attention was grabbed by a sort of wild woman who marched to the ticket counter, announcing she had just flown in from the Maritime Provinces and demanding when her flight was departing for Detroit.

It was impossible to overlook this human in disarray. Her guttural voice, hoarse and sexy, mumbled something about having been one of the top two swimmers in the world—though no one inquired about this of her. It projected itself loudly around the waiting room. These two comments— flying from the Maritimes and being a world-class competitor—were indiscriminately mentioned to those who were listening and to those who were not.

She was dressed in spiky-heeled boots and black leather pants with a stripe of chrome buttons slithering down the outside seams. Her hair was wild and peroxide-streaked, long extensions looking as though she might have slept for several nights and not been able to find a comb or brush in the mornings. A modicum of style flirted from the black leather jackets—there were several, layered on top of each other, as though she had no place to leave them behind—they too were glammed with sequins.

“Can you watch my bags?” she asked the counter attendant. When told that was not allowed, she wheeled her cases to a seat, then leaned over the back-to-to back chairs and asked two young boys, accompanied by a college-age sister, if she could have some of their McDonald’s fries. The boys, being boys and finding nothing strange about this request, quickly complied. “I like kids,” she explained to the sister who was not so compliant, all the while munching away on the requisitioned fries. She repeated her comment to everyone at the gate. By this time, most of them were deep into their newspapers, pretending not to gauge how close she was coming, all determined not to make eye contact. I noticed that the nearby seats were being vacated one by one.

When I returned from checking the arrival monitors, two security guards had been summoned by the desk clerk, and I watched them professionally assess the situation, engaging the woman in conversation. She answered their questions rationally. This December day—to their consternation, I imagined—was just a week or so away from an incident where an air marshal had shot a manic-depressive man who rushed the boarding stairs, declaring he had a bomb.

About now, that sure inner knowing, that instinctive inner push whispered, She hasn’t taken her meds this morning.

I intentionally moved closer to the woman, sitting directly across the aisle from where she was sitting, our knees facing each other.

Another waiting passenger in the seat beside me gave me a meaningful glance, then she and I began to chat. A Mennonite woman, she also was anticipating the arrival of a grandson from Phoenix. Our conversation was interrupted by the words, loudly spoken, “He stayed the whole night and didn’t even touch me.” This was followed by a disbelieving kind of chuckle. The lament was repeated. “He stayed the whole night and didn’t even touch me.” Now the words and the ironic laugh were addressed to me. Our eyes connected. The disoriented woman expected me to be amazed as well. If memory serves, I think I might have responded, “Well, perhaps he was just cold and tired.”

Not the kind of conversation I am used to engaging in with strangers.

I lost track of the Mennonite grandmother, who had moved to a seat beside the gate windows, but I somehow propelled, moved closer, nearer to this human locus of disorientation, and I questioned, as gently and as calmly as possible, having no way to anticipate her reaction, “Have you taken your meds today? I’m wondering because you’re acting like you haven’t taken your meds.”

Let me try and make you understand how unlike myself this kind of behavior is. I am an introvert, reluctant to initiate connections, careful about letting people close on first meetings. The ragged wretched of the earth dismay me, move me to compassion, but I’m generally confused as to how to approach them. But approach I did, and it was then I suspected that some kind of seismic shift had gone on in the fundamental apparatus of my personality and character.

There are markers in every human life, markers of maturity. Something happens, and we realize we are different than we have been. Anger no longer rises suddenly within. We feel comfortable and confident in our own skin when once dislocation had been an awkward companion. We think: Well, well, look at me! I didn’t realize I could do this, act like this, be this way, say these things so truthfully but without umbrage. Or, I didn’t know I could so charmingly deal with hostility! Irritations that used to trigger us no longer irritate. People who once aggravated us no longer annoy. We find conflict useful, in fact often clarifying, rather than terrifying.

This moment at Midway Airport was such a moment for me.

Perhaps it was because I’d given much of the last ten years to spending hours absorbing the stories of hundreds of people in the listening group format that I had designed and refined—some 250 listening groups in all. Perhaps I was reaching that stage of attunement the professionals study, that stage of universal compassion for floundering humanity about which the wisdom writers speak. I was not afraid, just a little uncertain, but still obedient to that inner nudge—which I might once have ignored—to move, to do, to speak. A quiet inward prod kept pushing me to interact with this woman everyone else in the gate seemed to be avoiding. Looking around, I realized that now, the airplane travelers had somehow relocated to seats nearer to those beside us.

The intriguing thing about listening, listening deeply, the neuroscientists tell us, is that the listener as well as the talker experience congruent shifts in their brains that eventually, if the listening practices are continual and regular, result in noticeable well-being.

Though I had been interviewing listening group members to see what changes they could identify after months of meeting together, I now suspected that it was I who had benefited the most. I might lead five listening groups in one week for two-and-a-half hours each and not have time myself to share, but after a while, I was intrigued to notice that I always felt heard. Impelled by the unusual growth I was witnessing in group participants, I began to read extensively. The words, I discovered, used to describe my sense of being heard, even though I had not shared, are “feeling felt” or “knowing that you are known.”

And now that I am paying attention, I realize that ten years of intentional listening have altered how I react and behave. As usual, the one who designs a methodology or adapts it as in my case, is the one who benefits from it the most.

Instantly upon hearing my question, “Have you taken your meds today?”, the demeanor of the woman shifted. She became a changeling child, abandoning the tough biker-gal or faded movie star who survived on shots of vodka, cigarettes, and pick-up guys. A softer voice answered, no longer the ragged notice-me tones of the previous braggadocio. Either another persona had emerged, or she suddenly felt safe, noticed, and not avoided. She quietly explained, “No, but they’re way packed up in my suitcase. You don’t want me to open that, do you?” None of her cases were very large.

“Well, I heard that you have four hours before your flight to Detroit. That’s certainly enough time. You get out your meds, and I’ll watch your things.”

Her hands fumbled with the zipper, and I could see the fake nails, glittered with gold polish, and beneath them, her real fingernails, gnawed to the flesh. About ten prescription bottles, all labeled with pharmaceutical instructions, were on top of her belongings. She began to separate out the medicines she needed to take today. I ran to buy her a bottle of water.

Upon returning, I waited to make sure she swallowed the pills, then asked, “Someone meeting you in Detroit?” “Sure,” she answered, gulping the handful down all at once. “My mom.”

“Well, then you really do want to be in good shape when she picks you up, don’t you?”

The little-girl-lost persona, wearing garish dress-up clothes, nodded her head, stood straight, put her arms around me, and gave me a big hug—the jangly earrings and hair strands and the mind careening from thought to thought all-enfolding me. “Thank you,” she whispered. “Thank you for taking care of me.” A wave of compassion pushed me to do more than hug her back; I held her.

“That’s what we’re here for, isn’t it?” I replied.

“Sure. We’re here for one another.” She stuffed the bottles back into her bag.

By this time, the Phoenix plane had landed, and my grandson, Nathanael, had disembarked with a stewardess eager for me to show my identification so she could offload him into my care. I was caught up finding my ID and signing the release papers and greeting this child and getting him something to eat while notifying my husband by cell phone that he could begin circling at the arrival doors outside.

“Helping that lady?” Nathanael asked. “Perhaps,” I answered. “Sometimes people just need a little help.”

But I wondered, wondered why I felt such compassion for this stranger, a woman who had actually reconfigured the passengers seating in the gate area—yes, she had. Why had I moved closer beside her when almost everyone else had moved away? Why was I able to do this now when I would never have been able to just a few years before?

I have met this lady before. She, or her likeness, has often inhabited the territory within me. At times, I have been displaced, a woman in disarray (though never a woman so openly in disarray). We shared a simpatico, an understanding, a communal confusion—she and I—just hanging in there, despite the odds. We both knew what it is like for someone to take courage in hand and move close.

“Have you taken your meds today? Can I get you some water?” might be posited in a thousand ways. “How are you a year-and-a-half since your son died?” someone asked me recently. “How is your shoulder after the rotator-cuff operation?” another friend inquired. “Bringing dinner tonight for you all. Thought it would help.” Care has been granted to me—now a companion mercy has visited me, from outside the normal range of my capabilities, a deep tenderness for some stranger’s lostness. I care. I care that you think you have been the second-best swimmer in the world.

Something has changed; a deep and ready identification with others has come my way. It has noticed that I am ready for it to inhabit me, finally, and though uninvited, it has settled in. And it is welcome, so welcome. An incident like this at Midway Airport Chicago is a personal marker showing me that I am becoming more than I knew. I bear in me a love for the world and for the people in it.

Amor mundi. And it has come to me as a gift.

Indeed, I know, indeed, I am convinced, that is why we’re here. We are here for one another.

“When a person tells her story and is truly heard and understood, both she and the listener undergo actual changes in their brain circuitry. They feel a greater sense of emotional and relational connection, decreased anxiety, greater awareness of and compassion for others’ suffering.” ─Daniel Siegel

Karen Mains

Karen Mains

BOOK CORNER

Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People
by Mahzarin R. Banaji and Anthony G. Greenwald

Knowing, personally, who we really are and what God intended for us to be: How we have succeeded in self-knowledge and how we have failed is not (I repeat) is NOT an easy task. This book makes the test of self-knowing (which is a huge spiritual undertaking and often a life-long endeavor) more comprehensible. It helps us pay attention to those incidents that reveal our private identities and that reveal them to ourselves! This book is written by two psychologists who are not writing out of a spiritual context. But the personal work they write about is one of the major spiritual journeys we all must undertake in order to become mature. In fact, the ongoing journey of self-discovery often, if not always, is accompanied by richer and deeper understandings of who God is and what He wants us to be! You can procure a used copy in good shape from either ThriftBooks.com or Amazon.com.