About Face!

Last weekend, I had the (unfortunate?) opportunity to work a rare 4-day trip. I say rare, because in the company’s great “wiz-dumb,” as a cost-cutting measure, they have been sending us out on 1-day trips like mad, allowing them to save on hotel costs and allowing me the privilege to fly back and forth to Denver so often that the gate agents think I somehow can’t make up my mind which direction I need to be going. Frankly, I sometimes wonder if I know myself!

Normally, I just glide on through the airport, letting time slip by, moving from flight to flight without really making any significant observations. When you work right in the public spotlight at almost every waking minute, you tend to shut out everything, simply for a few minutes worth of peace of mind – sort of a mental R & R break. This past Monday was different, somehow.

Not really aware of the reason, I found myself actually looking at people, traveling in the airport. When I was younger, I used to sit in places like malls or park benches and just observe people – their faces, their actions and their unconscious expressions (the ones they put across without really being aware of it). In high school, I even tried a social experiment for my Psychology class where a friend of mine and I had someone lock one side of a dual glass entry door at the mall, then posted a huge sign with red letters stating “Door Broken: Use Other Door” and then sat back and observed how many people actually approached the locked door, attempting to open it with the sign blaring right in their face. You’d be surprised how often people really do!

Anyhow, I digress…

So I found myself actually looking at people as I moved from flight to flight on Monday. I’m not sure why I was doing it but something prompted me to really look at the faces of the people traveling that day, and I wanted to share my observations with you.

People can really emit their personality in milliseconds just by looking at their faces. There’s the uptight businessman, who’s got the weight and pressure of his job crushing his psyche and taking years off his life in the process. How about the lost soul, how’s unsure of where they are, where they came from and which direction they are headed, a look of panic emanating from their eyes. There are the doting moms, the scolding moms, the moms who’ve “had it up to here!” and the moms who’ve learned to shut out the cries of protest from the three young kids she’s got in tow, who won’t leave each other alone.

Over there, a proud military man in camo-gear, chest out, shoulders back, shipping out; an exhausted soldier in camo-gear, hobbling on crutches, coming home.

There’s the newlywed couple, constantly glancing in each other’s eyes, heads tilted in towards each other; the elderly couple, gingerly helping one another get to their next flight, who look just as in love as the newlyweds. And there’s an elderly couple soon after, who respond to each other with loathing and guile, obviously bound together by tradition and duty, but the love’s long since vanished.

The point of all this is to show that not one of these people spoke to me directly. It was their faces – their body language – that told the tale. There were so many others that I omitted simply because I could continue indefinitely. In simple terms though, we are an interesting species, with the ability to communicate without uttering a single word. An ingenious ability, and not unlike my cat Zach, who can’t utter a single word, and yet can tell me exactly what he wants or what he needs through his body language. You’ve never seen a kitty smile? Look very closely – it’s there.

Zach’s face tells many stories too. It’s speaks of his affection for me when I return home from my trips, gets excited when the treats get handed out, communicates his need for human touch when he bumps his head on mine, fulfills his desire for comfort when he lays down next to me in bed and purrs up a storm, kneading my neck with his “never quite dull enough” claws.

I suppose that I have gotten too caught up in the daily mundane, to really stop and observe people. Perhaps we, as a society, have isolated ourselves enough not to care. The old proverb that one truly cannot understand the heart of a man until one has traveled a mile in his shoes really speaks to me here because I find myself really closing out the world around me at times and only focusing on the here and now, limiting my own vision to the yesterdays and tomorrows I’ve yet to…face.