Memorable encounters with people that shaped you...

What are your memorable encounters with people that you believe shaped you? I would love to hear them. I have several of them and will share one at a time. Cheers

When I was 9, I lived far from my grandparents. Even otherwise my grandfathers were not very intimate with me. A neighbor was an old man, and I addressed him grampa! I had to build a carboard house for a school project. The grampa helped me build it. This was 37 years ago, and I still remember the extreme details of that project! I first learnt about the nature of the cardboard. And then learnt about the reason for the shape of the house. Learnt to make glue (yes, we made the glue from starch didn't buy the glue). We used yellow color (paper, not paint). Most important lesson is this: love is all about quality time. Something embarrassing happened for none of my fault and we moved to different neighborhood. For many years I wanted to visit him but never did because I was embarrassed.

 

I would say my parents, my mum grew up in India till she was 23, I was 8 the first time she took me there. It was just like she used to tell us, breathtakingly sky’s, wonderful nature, so many peacocks. Then one day she took me somewhere not too far away, and I saw poverty, being a kid I started to play with a girl about my age, I asked her if she wouldn’t get in trouble for being outside with no shoes on, she just shrugged her shoulders and said I don’t have any, just like that, I don’t have any, needless to say I went back that day in bare feet, I also gave her my hair slides as she liked the way they sparkled in the sun. My mum didn’t say a word, just a smile that reached her eyes, now of course I know that smile was mission accomplished. I am always grateful for everything I have and try not to take more than I need.

 

i was not shaped by single individual persons, nor mostly in this life.
observing land forms, rocks and trees, their essence being their diversity, when not being distracted by humans from observing this.
i was shaped by a gentle breeze on a semi-clear spring day, its whispers and those of small creatures and other natural processes.
my first and most profound definitive experience in this life was the observation of a relatively simple miniature railway with a working signal system.

my parents were, or so i hope, mostly harmless, and seemed to mean well, or at least no harm to me.
and while they made some concessions in their own lives for the sake of my physical well being,
and i do not doubt they felt some affection toward myself and each other,
still i have no judgement to pass, for good nor ill toward them.

none of my formative experiencing in this life directly involved the influence of living human persons,
though statistical effects of the social gestalt had considerable effect on my emotional qualities of experiencing.

the social and the natural being two different things, and the natural being more usually the more spiritually positive to me in my experiencing of them.

by natural i mean even the mineral environment, as well as all of life beyond the social experience of this world's one sapient species.
entering this world came with me perspectives, preferences and priorities, evolved through other lifetimes on other worlds,
along with dreams before birth that may or may not have been in the nature of memories.

these included technologies this world did not yet have, a very few it still may not, but no clear images of what the species of people in those previous lives may have looked like.

i have also felt and experienced the nonphysical, though in ways words do not effectively describe, nor does such connectedness as i experience it, in any close way, relate to the expressions claimed by any named genre of belief.

beyond the existence of at least one god or godlike being, and by that i mean not dependent on possessing any physical form of any sort for its existence, there is just really nothing in my experiencing of this, connecting it in any way with the claims and expressions of knowledge of any belief i have studied, and while i cannot claim my studies of them to have been encyclopedic, i have researched more then a few and that from within each their own perspective.

 

Wow. My Kid would love that.

 

i have had memorable encounters with places, with the feeling of spirit in places and with finding things in "undeveloped" places, on trails in relative wilderness though not always more then a few hours walk from so called civilization, and finding things in them, physical things even, that i had encountered previously only in dreams.

what was so profound about seeing that model railway, there was on the only the one trolley car on it, going all the way around that basement to the one place where it would stop and reverse and go all the other way around and repeat, is that this was in 1949. integrated circuits did not yet exist, nor l.e.d.s, all there was to construct logic circuits from were vacuum tubes, silicon diodes, and elector-mechanical relays. the guy, who was a friend of my father's, was a signal maintainer and these were much the same sort of circuits as used on real railways at the time.

my first solo encounters with nature, still before kindergarten, were a similar positive. growing up as i did in small villages and towns, where a kid could wander around and explore, and learn how to not chaise creatures away so as to observe them, and of course the diversity that is the nature of rocks and trees.

 

I have had some interesting experiences of this sort during my train journeys in the last two decades.

The city I worked in was quite far away from my hometown, and I had a two day rail travel journey to go home and back during the vacations. But I really enjoyed the train travels, sitting beside the window, lapping up the warm sunshine, sipping hot tea and snacks, and watching the constantly changing scenery outside.

While reading books and magazines, I also chatted with the people in the cabin with me. They were complete strangers, but sitting together for an hour or two dispelled all sense of aloofness and out of boredom we used to start chatting.

They were usually polite, courteous and friendly, which made it an enjoyable experience. At times, I found intelligent company whose talks helped to bring profound new perspectives and useful insights to me. Even now, I still wonder at the insight and knowledge I received from one such conversation from a complete stranger which shaped my perspective greatly.

I also spotted one of my co=passenger having Che Guevara's 'Motorcycle diaries' , and borrowing it from him, read it in a couple of hours.

Once I found the cabin full of catholic nuns, and chatted with them. I found this interesting and coincidental because I had been meditating with some Hindu nuns in an ashram a few hours back.

With each passing year, one thing I noted was the increasing number of train passengers hooked on to their mobiles, tablets or laptops and averse to conversation. The frequency of such passengers increased in urban areas through which the train traveled.

A young relative of mine who is working in the coast guard told me about the time when his town got flooded by incessant rain water, leading to cessation of communications and power.

He stated that he actually enjoyed this phase, as it forced people off their mobiles and forced them to converse with each other, till 'normality' returned.

 

Mom: disappeared into Mexico when I was 4. Never came back. Dad: lived with him for a few years. A cold hearted banker. An asshole. Gramma: A kind hearted soul that took me in , "raised me " and taught me the only religion I have ever needed :" Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. " ( didn't always make it--but always tried )
Maybe somewhat different than the usual influential type people most have encountered. So it goes.

 

@scratcho Please accept my bearhugs

 

Thank you brother----will do.

 

What a truly wonderful thread.
I have met some truly inspiring people in my life. I think it was my first psychology teacher that influenced me the most.
She taught me that bullshit baffles brains, so remember to think twice about what you are told. Helps me spot any Catfish on HIP too.

 

I've a friend, an Honduran lady, who is a dentist and provides dental relief in remote impoverished villages. I met her when I was doing construction in one of the villages that was devasted by hurricane Mitch. One day she had extracted so many rotten teeth that she was physically exhausted, yet the line was still long. Long story made short, she recruited me to learn bush dentistry (tooth extraction) which I accepted to get out of the sun for bit, and her and I worked together many times therafter. She speaks some english, and I some spanish. We've had many deep conversations at the end of a hard day, covered in blood and sweat. Just soaking in her wisdom and perspective from the developing world point of view humbled and challenged me. Her dedication and personal sacrifice to those in great need have made a lasting impression on me. We catch up with each other every two or three years. I go down there every 3 or 4 years, and she visits the US occasionally. She always call me her "strong man" and makes a muscle!

 

When I was very young, we lived in a place that had a small clinic in the front. There was a young nurse who worked in the clinic and also lived close by in the neighborhood. She was unusually tall, beautiful and always wore makeup. Lot of people would flirt with her. She neither reciprocated nor got offended.
One day a very old man flirted with her and tried to touch her hip. She gave a firm slap on his wrist. Teased him calling him naughty. And next moment, in a stern voice, told him to behave. This incident is itched in my mind for some reason. Some of the dynamics, I understood only years later as I looked back into the memory.
I admired her gentle strength. Because of her I developed an eternal liking towards nurses. Every nurse reminds me of her. I always treated nurses with extra kindness. After I moved to the US, I extended this to my hair stylists & LMT. I consider their service as intimate and hence, consider that as a privilege.

 

My step dad and mom started a small dairy farm when I was very young. I had a lot of trouble dealing with the cows, horses and machinery. So I grew up feeling overwhelmed most of the time until I reached my 16th birthday when we hired an amish boy to come work and live on the farm. He grew up with cows, horses and machinery, and was a very talented dairyman even though he was also only 16. Well from that time on whenever I had a problem, he would be there to help me out of it. For example, the phone rang in the middle of the night because our cows were loose and grazing on his front lawn. I'm talking 60 large animals. So I knocked on Davids' (the 16 year old Amish boy) door and got him out of bed. When we got to the neighbors house our neighbor started yelling at David but David was too focused on getting the cows rounded up and back to pay him any mind. We did do it in the dark and fixed the broken fence.
So David lived in my mind for another 15 years, helping me out of horrid situations like this one and I couldn't help falling in love with him.

 

So....the rest of the story?

 

lol yes there are many stories and I have even written a few of them down. My step dad is more a guru to me now so some of them do fit into this Philosophy and religion section.

 

I had a smart, competent, woman as a teacher in grades 4 thru 7 at our 2 room country school. She instilled a love for geography in me that lasted my lifetime. My last job after retiring from Federal service was teaching…..geography at our local community college! But I learned more than geography from her. In contrast to my family growing up I learned that women were every bit as competent as men in the world and were to be treated with the same respect and courtesy.

 

Here is more of the story:


We were young when we met, we were both 16. At that time my mom, step dad and I were having a very hard time running the dairy farm. There was a lot of stress and things were looking bad until David showed up. Even at 16 he made a great difference in our lives and especially mine. He was as dedicated to the farm and the cows as I was and we would work together day in and day out. It was wonderful. I got to the point where I was so grateful that I would do anything for him. He had about 15 brothers and sisters so he didn’t get much attention growing up.

I remember going to Walmart with him and realizing that he had never been in a big store like that and started to get really nervous to the point where I had to take him outside. That’s how pure he was.

After a few years he got married and brought his wife to live on the farm too. But our relationship didn’t change. We were still dedicated to the cows and making the dairy work was the most important thing to us.

One night I dreamt that some kind of monster was attacking the farm and I tried to stop it but it was too strong for me and then David came and overcame the monster. But then as the monster ran away, he went after it and in the dream I had the feeling he wasn’t coming back. That killing this monster was his destiny.

Well the night before he left I woke up from a sound sleep because the house was filling up with smoke. Now I usually just sleep with a T-shirt and ran down to the wood stove in the basement without stopping to put more on. Our houses are connected in the basement and David had also smelled the smoke and came running down. It turned out to be just a stove pipe had come lose and it was soon fixed. But as we looked at each other I felt something I had never felt before. I felt for the first time that I wanted to give myself completely to a man. It didn’t happen of course but I guess I’m still waiting to feel like that again to the person I marry.

 

Wise move....so do you still keep in touch?

 

So after he left I didn’t hear from him for two years before he came to visit. There were lots of people around when we finally saw each other again but that didn’t matter much to me. We just made this incredible contact and both of us fell into the rabbit hole while the people around us started doing their best to distract us from merging with each other. But we had spent almost 15 years living in each others’ mind and we both missed going to that special place where the magic happens. I told him that I owed him a debt that I could never repay. But he already knew that. We both needed certain things from the world at that particular time, which were crucial to our survival, and coming together like that was something that came natural to us when we had to materialize what we needed from the world. Finally we both came to the surface and went our separate ways again.