Memorable encounters with people that shaped you...

So, do you think you were better or worse for seeing him again after all that time?

 

Well I'm more of an empath which means my reality isn't centered on the surface of things. For me there is a reality deeper than seeing David and being with him on the physical plane. At the level of consciousness where I live, he is always with me and I am grateful for this.

 

:-(

 

My mother was a mean and angry woman that treated every human being she encountered with disdain - she was the original Karen. She would take everything to a manager to complain without consideration for anyone else in the room, including her family. My mother was so brutal that she had figuratively beaten my father (who was a kind and gentle soul) into submission.

As I grew older, my goal in life was to keep from accepting a partner like that and to never accept that kind of person in my life.

My father passed away quite some time back, but just before my mother passed, I had her over to my home for a visit (when my wife was away on business travel) and as we were sitting in my back yard talking, she was telling me about how bad everything was in her life. I said to her is there nothing she thinks happened good in her life like her 4 children, where she responded "if I my parents would have had the money to send me to convent school, I would have never married, and never had you kids, and my life wouldn't have been so miserable."

That sums up what she was like - she played a big role in how I patterned my life.

 

Sounds like you may have had to learn how to treat subsequent females that came into your life. I sure did.

 

It's not so much having to learn how to treat females as much as I learned what I won't accept in a relationship.

 

The older I get, the more I realize just how fucked up my childhood was...things that were just accepted as the norm were just plain wrong. However, it made me want to be a good father and I have great relationships with my kids.

 

Me too.

 

I will put aside parents and other immediate surroundings and their obvious influence.

Of later chance encounters I was not impressed by many. I was especially unimpressed with otherwise worshiped religious figures, probably because not very prone to peer pressure and crowd mentality.
Spent a lot of younger years in ashrams and monasteries, meat zen masters and yogis, big-name frauds, and borderline criminals like Sai Baba and low-key decent and likable Sadhus, but no one made a lasting impression.

One guy I do remember was a regular professor of philosophy holding a short one-semester course at the Uni.

Probably the most dispassionate, detached, and just purely analytical mind I have seen when dealing with general and fundamental issues ( it is easy to be that when dealing with a specific technical issue using outright mathematical tools).
Newer seen him being emotionally involved, personally attached to any POV etc. Difficult to describe really as it is a perception coming probably from nonverbal clues as much as from what was said. Decades later still remember how it stood out.