What if people could see inside you?

A rainy day in Bucharest, and clearly too early in the morning to use more than 1% or 2% (at most) of those lazy gray cells in my brain. I think I remember (unless it was a dream) a pleasant dinner a few hours ago, with a full-bodied Romanian red wine, and a visit to the bar at the hotel for a last drink with colleagues before hitting my bed. Business trips are often dull and indistinguishable from one another. But yesterday was somewhat memorable for 2 reasons.

The first one was a charming conversation over dinner with a friend, a male friend for a change, fortunately not about sports or women (believe it or not).

And the second one was the gorgeous waitress at the bar of the Intercontinental Hotel bar in Bucharest. A blond beauty of shy eyes, too polite to tell me off following my poor attempts to talk her up.

Nothing memorable so far - you will think – just Sasha’s usual failure to be witty and engaging. Ok, ok … you are probably right. But in her gentle, although not for that less disappointing, rejection there was something else. Hiding in there, behind a thick curtain of good manners, there was a bored look of someone used to be stared at by wishful, if hopeless, semi-drunk clients. So for the first time in a while, I tried to walk out of my self-centric universe and jump into her shoes. I wanted to look at myself from her point-of-view, thereby learning something about myself in the process …

And I am afraid what I saw kept me awake until well after midnight. There I was, in a smart but nonetheless boring suit and tie. Looking tired and cut to the same pattern as millions of men around the world. Not specially tall or short, without any remarkable features, and looking more like 40 years old than 31 (at least according to the young eyes of my friend Julia). In short, just a young-ish man instinctively (as dictated by nature) attracted to the beauty of the opposite sex, and making stupid comments after a drink or two too many.

And to be perfectly honest, all that is true … but is that really me? What about my feelings, my hopes, my fears? When I think of myself I can see a complex human being struggling to define himself, searching for answers to an ever increasing number of questions. A lonely soul trying to understand the world around, and timidly attempting to reach into people’s heart and soul.

But that is obviously not what you can see from the outside. I wonder what would happen if people could see inside me. What if people were able to look right through and into my soul? Would people like me more or less? Or is perhaps my soul as mediocre and unremarkable as my looks may be?

I challenge you to look inside yourself and seek an answer to that question … but just be careful. You may not like what you see!