Things People Have Told Me Part 4

August 21, 2026

Sometimes a person says something so astonishing, so far beyond the boundaries of ordinary reason, that we are left speechless. The remark may be absurd, inappropriate, or completely disconnected from the urgency of the moment—yet the person saying it treats it as perfectly normal. Such a thing was once said to me, and I have never forgotten it.

It was a summer day many years ago. My brother Trevor, our mother Louise, my ten-year-old son Ben, and I were fishing from a medium-sized Boston Whaler in the Gulf of Mexico. We had traveled a couple of miles offshore and had been enjoying the day when we decided to move to another fishing spot. Trevor turned the key. Nothing happened. He tried again. Still nothing. The motor would not start.

We were now stranded and drifting steadily toward shore. Ordinarily, being carried toward land might sound reassuring, but not in a small boat approaching breaking waves. If we entered the surf broadside, the boat could capsize. My mother in her seventies and my young son were aboard, and we had no radio and no way to summon help. This was way before anyone had a cell phone in their pocket.

We waved our arms toward the faraway beaches, but no one responded. No other boats were passing nearby. Trevor and I looked at one another. Without saying much, we both understood that one of us would have to swim for it. Trevor stayed behind, paddling as hard as he could to slow the boat’s movement toward the surf. I dove into the water and began swimming.

When I finally reached the beach and emerged from the Gulf, breathless and dripping, a man who had been sitting nearby with his wife approached me. “You all are in trouble out there, aren’t you?” he asked. “Yes,” I said. “Our motor won’t start. We have a child and an older person aboard, and the boat is drifting into the waves. We need help immediately.”

“Follow me,” he said. “You can call the rescue squad from my condominium.” We began running. He led me through a maze of beachfront buildings, across wooden walkways, up one flight of stairs and down another, until we finally arrived at his condominium. He opened the sliding glass door, and we stepped into the middle of a large party. Music was blaring. People were talking and laughing. The room was packed.

The man hurried toward the kitchen, where a telephone was mounted on the wall. Almost immediately, however, he returned with a troubled expression.

“Oh no,” he said. “I’m so sorry.” I waited for the bad news.

“Someone is on the phone.”

Someone was on the phone.

My mother, my brother, and my ten-year-old son were drifting toward dangerous surf in a disabled boat—but someone was already using the telephone. To say that I was incredulous would be a considerable understatement.

For a moment, I simply stared at him. What sort of universe was this man inhabiting? What system of values placed telephone etiquette above a life-and-death emergency? Did he imagine that we should wait politely while someone finished discussing dinner plans, neighborhood gossip, or the events of the party? The statement was so bizarre that it left me without words.

Exasperated, I crashed through the vertical blinds hanging over the sliding glass door and ran back outside. To this day, I can remember those blinds brushing across my face and arms as I burst through them. I began racing down the stairs, intending to knock on every door in the building until I found a telephone—and perhaps a person inhabiting the same moral universe I was.

Then I heard the man shouting behind me. “Come back! Come back! She just got off the phone!”

Desperation overcame incredulity. I returned to the condominium, made the call, and reached the nearby fire department. Within minutes, rescue personnel on personal watercraft surrounded our boat. They secured it with ropes and just in time, kept it from being swept into the breaking waves. Everyone was safe.

Years later, the man’s words still amuse and astonish me: “Someone is on the phone.”

Yet perhaps the spiritual meaning of this story lies not merely in the foolishness of one stranger. It lies in the unsettling recognition that all of us sometimes fail to perceive the true importance of the moment before us. We can become so absorbed in the ordinary that we do not recognize the extraordinary. We may protect our routine while someone nearby is drowning in grief. We may defend a rule while a human being needs mercy. We may continue an argument, a schedule, a meeting, or a telephone conversation while life itself is calling for our attention. Incredulity arises when two realities suddenly collide. One person sees danger; another sees inconvenience. One sees suffering; another sees an interruption. One hears an urgent cry; another hears only background noise.

The Enneagram tells us our patterns, our autopilot, our traps, our passions, fixations, and avoidances that take us out of reality and into a universe that sanity does not recognize. These moments shock us because if we are lucky enough to realize how crazy they are, they reveal how profoundly unconscious we human beings can become.

But before we condemn the person who cannot see, we might also ask ourselves: What am I not noticing? Whose emergency have I mistaken for an inconvenience? What suffering have I overlooked because I was preoccupied with something less important? Incredulity can become more than outrage. It can become a spiritual alarm—a sudden awakening to the distance between what matters and what does not. The soul knows the difference.

Spiritual Practice and Inquiry

What statement has been said to you that was so preposterous that it sounded like it came from someone in another universe? What has been your spiritual response to it and all other statements made to you that are beyond the pale?

Prayer

Dear God, 

Help me to enter others’ worlds without being of their world.

Amen