Caring Enough to Find Out

There’s a lot of talk about bringing our spirituality to the workplace and not separating our spiritual life from our “normal life.” I finally got what that meant in my relationship with a co-worker.

I sat side by side with a coworker who I found very hard to understand. Basically, everyone thought she was nuts because it was seemingly impossible to understand where she was coming from, or what she meant when she said things. People would tend to get a little cross-eyed listening to her statements. And we would often roll our eyes when talking about her.

Just about every other day, with great exasperation, I would tell my mentor, Sara, about something unintelligible my co-worker had said to me, hoping to get Sara’s sympathy for my troubled situation. Sara would regularly reply, "Well, did you ask her what she meant?" Feeling justified in blowing my poor coworker off, I replied "Heck NO I didn't ask what she meant. She's nuts!" What a jerk I was -- I totally admit it. 

Finally, one day it dawned on me that my position really stank, and nothing was changing or getting better. I needed to give this person a chance, and remember Sara’s advice WHEN those things were happening.

So the next time my coworker said something "crazy," I asked her what she meant. I still didn't understand her explanation, but now I was interested. So I asked what she meant by THAT, and she kept talking. Eventually, through enough talking, I understood what she meant, and surprisingly, she actually made sense to me! Even more surprising, once I had made all that effort to understand her, I actually began to feel affinity for her.

For weeks I went through this process with her, setting aside my knee-jerk reaction to her, and instead asking what she meant by things. I tried to understand where she was coming from, and asked for clarity from her each time it was unclear. We started to be able to talk through things, and to think together about how best to do our work. It was imperfect, but it was better, and our relationship was becoming sincere.

Then, she started opening up and telling me all kinds of things about her life and her current feelings. As I listened, she felt cared for. I became more and more interested in her, and started to really like her, to love her, and to understand her heart, and I desired to understand her even better. We became friends! Eventually, I knew what she meant without even asking her, even when it sounded crazy, because I understood the kinds of associations she made, and where they stemmed from. In the end I could explain to others what she was talking about, and would, on occasion, even speak for her because I knew where she was coming from.

More importantly perhaps than this, is the fact that she started to trust me. When she said something that really didn't make sense, I could talk with her about it openly and offer a different perspective so she could have more clarity -- I started to be able to help her be more clear, and cogent, and intimate. Together we became better people. I became less judgmental and more caring, willing to go deeper with people in general, and she became more understandable, more capable of saying what she meant, and more open-hearted.

It was a miracle of love – thank you Sara, and thank you love!
-- Mati