Shift Your Soul Sideways

I just finished reading a fascinating book...Let The Great World Spin. Using a line from my dear friend..."It's a book about the human experience." It's so true. There is an eclectic cast of characters whose lives intersect, sometimes collide and there is hope and faith and love and light and darkness and reality all intertwined in it. A bit like life.
We all walk through life with many of the same experiences, all different, but all within a range of human emotions. Happiness, sadness, fear, loss....you know what I am talking about. Whenever we are brave enough to share our stories, we find that we are mostly more similar than we are different. We all have the potential to be good, to be the very best version of ourselves, but our tendency is to do otherwise, and so we must work at staying the course (unless you are a saint).
I've felt uninspired lately, or to use another line from another friend, "I feel uninteresting." I do believe that every life is a story waiting to be told, but mine lately doesn't feel worthy of writing. I'm not in a funk, I'm not doing anything extraordinary, I'm just living and what is interesting about that, ha? I think this might be one of those entries where I am talking out loud.
One of the things that keeps coming up for me lately is my radar for people. I don't know what else to call it. I feel like I am always in tune with people's temperature. I don't find myself trying to fix it, but I find myself needing to acknowledge where people are at, or at least where I perceive them to be. I found myself after yoga class the other day telling one of my students something I could see about them or rather feel without them saying so. I can see the internal struggle. It used to be okay for me to just observe people, to create stories in my mind about what they were experiencing and why. I feel like I have moved on to a place where I have to talk to them about it. It isn't comfortable for everyone, but most people let me in at least a little bit.
I remember a time many years ago when I was up in the San Juan islands with my husband for the funeral of an old friend. I found myself in the grocery store witnessing the produce guy stacking fruit and seeing or perceiving his dissatisfaction with what he was doing. I felt pulled to engage him, to ask him why he continued to do this work if it wasn't what he wanted to be doing. Sounds simple, but who knows, his story may have been a complicated one? I did end up asking him if he liked his job. He said no and I asked him why he stayed. He didn't have an answer really.
It's really simple in many ways, this human life. We all experience birth and death and a myriad of things in between. We are all seeking love, a feeling of being connected and every once in a while something happens, we read something, we meet somebody, we do something that scares us, we lose something important to us...SOMETHING happens and our soul gets shifted sideways a little. (To give credit where credit is due, this line comes from an interview at the end of the book I referred to previously). We open our eyes a little more, we listen a little closer and we see what life is really all about. We feel alive and we feel very aware of how impermanent this all is. It feels good, even when it hurts.
I suppose for now, I should be thankful that life feels boring, or uneventful, whatever you want to call it. It's life. I'm living. I'm breathing, feeling, experiencing...and that, in an of itself, is enough to write about.