Party?

The event had all the trappings of a diplomatic social event. Humans are best able to sincerely articulate their accumulated wisdom and, just as importantly, listen to a differing but informed perspective when they are comfortable being human. In short, the drill was anything but trivial.

Acknowledging another culture's customs is a step to becoming aware of how our automatic responses can skew and therefore diminish our objectivity in a plan to collectively synthesize something new.

Her nervous responses to the uncertainty preceding the event were highly visible to him, for he had arranged the get together. He wondered now what his nervous behavior looked like to her. He felt anticipation, indeed trepidation before it occurred, but how would this person he had known for a couple of decades see his altered behavior in this context?

Very little in his relationship to her to date was predicated on the decoding/interpreting part of the project. "Wait a minute", he thought "careful what verb really applies. So often his explicit thoughts were only as deep as his conscious awareness. More and more of late, he realized how shallow this really was (and that he was not alone in this regard).

A notification signal just arrived. He looked at its content. Something about a very high level activity that had nearly universal appeal. Timely that it arrived at the moment, he thought. Conscious awareness, an executive function in his view, was a key component of being a human. The signal's message backed up the notion of the primacy of this top layer of human cognition. Engaging it is key, another puzzle on this ... ok, let go ... magnificent mission. Regarding it as such gave it even more life. He smiled, deeply.