Today I had the pleasure of having a great conversation with a lovely man. I’ll call him Mr. J. We live in the same apartment building and our paths crossed in the lobby as I was going out and he was coming in and, after three minutes of “lobby talk” we decided to go sit outside and chat some more. We sat in the cold next to the fake plants near the entrance of the building talking about “stuff” and watching people come and go.

He was telling me about his chronic health condition and I had some interesting and helpful ideas I thought he could try. He’s a very nice man, we’ve had several brief chit chat sessions before, but this talk was the longest one yet. His appointment with his Dr. is coming up soon and the last time I bumped into him before Christmas, afterwards I had made a mental note to follow up with him about the Oximeter device I suggested he get to monitor his blood oxygen level. He appreciated the suggestion and also found it pretty amusing that his Dr. had never mentioned anything like this to him.

Mr J. is a confident, talkative, kind, engaging and energetic 73 year old Austrian gentleman with thick skin and a very soft, sweet heart and an infectious smile. As we sat on the little ledge there together, he told me about his past as a child growing up quite poor looking after his younger brother while his Mother worked to provide for them. He told me about the holes in the soles of his shoes and how he tried to hide them using tape when he went to school. And he talked about a few of the sufferings he’s experienced in his life and he gave me his opinion on Dr.’s and healthcare, an opinion in which I shared.

The attitude he chooses to embrace his story is what really gets me flying. Attitude is everything someone once told me, and I’ve carried that simple phrase with me my entire life.

The ideas I had about the changes he could make to his lifestyle in order to reduce his symptoms and the level of suffering he experiences, had him quite curious and intrigued. He was pretty locked in to what I was saying, I wanted to see how far I could go and how much he would absorb. If it wasn’t for the light changing from day to night, we would have continued talking there in the cold for hours I imagine.

He began to tell me that the changes he would need to make in order to feel better would bring much suffering to his life. “I’ll have to give up this and that, and it won’t be the same as this or that, and I’m 73! I’m already set in my ways and making changes like this will be so hard and require a lot of willpower and discipline, I just don’t think I have it in me”. I appreciated his brutal honesty. I told him that I really understood, change is hard, uncomfortable, it’s definitely not cozy and it sounded like he was content on living with his symptoms. Habits are hard to change at any age and I told him that if he looked more intimately at the relationship he has with himself, that it would help to change the relationship he has with his specific problem and that choosing something different and new takes great courage, and that courage is already alive and well inside him.

Then I asked him if the level or degree of suffering from making the changes I was talking about, would be higher or lower, more intense or just so so compared to the suffering he has already gone through in his life. I tried to drill into his mind that I was trying to help remove some of his suffering and not cause more of it, and that sacrificing things comes with the territory on the road to suffering less. He didn’t speak for a moment after that, and he looked straight at me and I could tell he was deep in thought about this. He replied that this change would not be as intense or as difficult as those other sufferings he’s lived through. He had a smirk on his face now as he was looking at me. I think he figured out I really knew what I was talking about and, I kept smiling, as I do.

Emotional attunement and co-regulation is highly underrated and vastly difficult to come across these days. And I found some of this today with Mr. J. Our energies had the same colour and vibration, and my intuition told me to hang on and spend a little more time with him. He was giving to me, just as much as I was giving to him, and it was such a pleasant dance.

He wasn’t interested in scampering off either. He did have an agenda, as did I. Yet we made a choice to take this time to sit here speaking our truth, holding space for one other and letting it flow in simple, honest harmony. I don’t have chats like this enough. It’s chats like this, listening, agreeing, disagreeing, empathizing, using genuine empathetic mirroring, inquiring, complimenting and simply appreciating and admiring one another for being so authentic and true, that really remind you what “connecting” is supposed to feel like.

An unexpected, thirty minute, conversational delight that propelled me forward for the rest of my afternoon. When you spend a lot of time alone inside a solitude of sorts, protecting your peace and energy, and then have an encounter like this, it’s like…diving into a refreshingly cool, crystal clear, completely deserted turquoise body of water, after a long, silent stint in a scorching hot, dry and empty desert. I don’t mean to make solitude sound so uncomfortable, it’s actually one of my most comfortable places.

Thank you Mr. J, and Thank YOU for reading!