Burlington, Vermont is a city that I’m going to have to go back and visit for more than 8 hours at some point in the future. My stop there occurred solely because of a gap in my schedule. I was flying back east from Salt Lake City and didn’t head to Denver until Saturday, so I had 1 day to fill.
I looked at all of the possible JetBlue ‘day trips’ that I could take out of JFK and Burlington won out. As has become the norm on this journey, I started to chat it up with the lady next to me on the plane. She was headed up for the weekend for a family event. She lives in NYC and used to be a documentary film maker who’s now working on becoming a speech pathologist. We had a really great conversation and traded stories. The conversation was quite personal and I’m not going to share the details, but I will share the message.
It’s a message that has become pretty familiar to me over the past few weeks; live with passion. I don’t know about you, but I forget to do that. Often. We’ve all heard all of the different sayings about living life to it’s fullest. In fact we even call them cliches, things like ‘seize the day’ or ‘live life to the fullest’ — but the more I talk to people, the more stories I hear, the more I realize there is nothing cliche about them. We make them cliche. Why do we do that?
I’m starting to thing that it’s because we’re scared. Scared to live life to the fullest because we don’t know what that means. Or, even worse, what it means to you might not be what it means to me; therefore we are worried about being judged because of the differences.
What I saw in Burlington is a town that is more acceptable of differences then most. My bus ride from the airport into the city was $1.25. I only had $1 bills. The driver told me not to worry about the $0.25 and told me to do something good for someone and it would all work out. Later in the day, as I was walking along the lake, a man walked up to me. He was a little younger than I am and was clearly living on the streets and out of his backpack. He spoke in a very soft tone and with a bad speech impediment.
At the time I was looking pretty grungy – hadn’t showered in 2 days, hadn’t shaved in 3 days, hadn’t slept in a bed in 2 days, and was also walking around w/ a pack on my back. He walked up to me and asked me if I could spare some change so he could get a hot dog at the stand just down the street because he was hungry. I told him that I would if he would answer a question for me. He smiled and said sure. I then asked him if he’d ever been affected by cancer.
End result? An hour long conversation while eating a hot dog with him and finding out that his mom also died from cancer when he was 19. He doesn’t have a cell phone or an email address, so I’ll probably never see or speak to him again, but Mark, if you ever see this, thank you for your time, your story, and your company on a day when I was feeling lonely. I hope that when you get the chance you’ll buy someone a hot dog.