pick up lines

"What happened to your toes?" he asked me. Standing in the coffee line, I looked up from my phone to find a beautiful sandy blond young man had stepped up next to me. Wearing a blue polo shirt and crew shorts, coffee in hand, he had questioned me about my toes. The second and third toes of my left foot had healing wounds from a moment of frustration a week ago. I had abruptly pulled open a coffee shop door which grazed over my bare toes, scraping the skin and leaving them bruised.

My mind filled with the day's agenda and the immediate tasks at hand, for which I was late; his comments thoughtfully sent toward me smacked hard against my brickwall of oblivion and fell to the ground in pieces. After mumbling my story and some awkward pauses, he moved on and my friend returned from her perusing of merchanize on the far wall. "Lisa, guess what just happened!" I recounted the story and she smiled, quipping, "that was a great line!" I stopped abruptly; he was hitting on me? My toes? Really?

Yeah, he was trying hard - had looked me over from top to bottom landing on the only other bare element besides my face and hands: my toes off the end of my feet, extending below my dark jeans. And I? I had brushed him off, a little slow on the uptake. Rather than continue the next obvious question: "what's your name?" or "your toes are nicely intact" or "what are you doing here on a Sunday  morning?" I had abruptly stopped, choosing to stand there, impassive like a marble sculpture captured in this moment of time, unable to adapt and move with the incoming tide.

My therapist smiled at the story and pondered aloud, "why are you looking at my toes?" Her brilliant, simple response reminded me I try too hard to fifure out what someone wants or the meaning of the situation rather than place that burden right back where it came from and ask, rather than assume.

As I left her office for the last time I carried with me this new tool: receiving an observation and simply asking a question back - refusing to take on the burden of breaking a code. When people or circumstances present themselves entirely out of context or I am too preoccupied to follow the linear thought, my response should always be a question of "why?" freeing me from the burden of myself and expanding the horizon of opportunity.