Article Link: http://stage.exchangepress.com/article/a-manner-of-speaking/5009458/
"What all persons have in common is their uniqueness. Every person has a story to tell. That's what makes a person and defines the journey that person makes through life." - Your Mythic Journey - Finding Meaning in Your Life through Writing and Storytelling by Sam Keen and Anne Valley-Fox (New York: The Putnam Publishing Group, 1973)Most of us are familiar with airplane bonding, a phenomena that occurs when we are trapped for hours in intimate proximity to a random selection of strangers - a great opportunity to study balding patterns and the finer points of hygiene. To bond or not to bond - always an issue, but not always one's choice. It's amazing how many strangers we can meet in this way, and after extended and intense conversation, how quickly we can forget them.
But not all of them. I cannot forget Hildegarde who taught my son Aaron to play poker; or Ed who was pondering the ethics of inventing the artificial brain (I am not making this up); or the first-time flyer whose nail prints marked me for weeks; or Andrea, revisiting her family in Bosnia. I can forget all the statistics ...