Seeing and Hearing

coffee with . . . Anna Fajkowski December 1, 2008

So Saturday afternoon I got a nice cup of coffee with my good friend Anna Fajkowski. I would definitely say Anna and I have a fairly interesting relationship. We meet a year and a half ago in the Mercury Cafe while swing dancing. She was spending her summer semester at CU Boulder, after spending a semester in London–and yet she goes to school in Boston, while finding her home in Washington DC. All of this swirled together in a pot makes for an interesting sort of friendship.

We see each other when she comes to Denver/Boulder to visit her mom, which is about twice a year, and we always go to the same starbucks and get some coffee.

This past Thanksgiving week Anna came to visit her family, and for some unknown reason this particular reunion was particularly sweet and full of joy. Maybe it was because of the holidays, maybe be it was because we haven’t see each other since the spring, or maybe because I’m about to leave for a tropical island in a month and we have no idea when we will share a nice hot cup of coffee again.

As we walked around our circle of conversation one interesting thought arose. We were talking about people and companionship and family which lead to knowing people and naturally communication. In the midsts of this she told me about a friend who’s dad is a psychiatrists and when people come to talk to him instead of him just giving advise he listens and figures out the rules that exist in that specific person’s life. Anna went on to explain how everyone has their own unique world and each person has a certain rules of operation and expectations for people to live up to. So this man learns the rules of the person’s world and then proceeds to give advise based on those rules.

This stuck me as quite an interesting concept and it put some things, and some people, in my life in to a bit of perspective. There are some people who clearly have a vastly different set of rules that runs their friendship than I have, and often times I find the actions, or inaction, quite mind boggling–yet when I attempt to address the subject I find that the communication is totally lost in the static and all efforts are completely unproductive.

It may be wise to learn rules of other people’s worlds, not so that I can operate according to their rule book, but so that I can understand how they communicate–enabling me to communicate clearly to them addressing the actions that leave me mind boggled in a way that communicates care with out disregarding their rules. For often time once a person violates the laws of another persons world their words cease to be heard and offense is taken.

So what do you all, out in the cyber world think? What rules dictate the orbits of your life? And what do you do when a planet clearly forgets about gravity and just leaves your solar system, or centripetal force and comes crashing in upon you sun?