The other day, as we parked the car and headed into the mall to return a few items, I noticed a bit of action outside of Nordstrom. Three guys were coming through the glass doors; one guy had one of those fluorescent yellow construction vests wrapped around a bulky item, and was handing it over to a second guy.
“How nice!” I thought (I literally did think this.) “He’s bought his friend a surprise gift!” As I got closer, the second guy removed the vest to reveal a plush maroon blanket, neatly folded and tied with one of those wide, Nordstrom-ey fabric bows.
The guys, it should be noted, were pretty scruffy. But most guys in Colorado are very scruffy, truth be told. It’s the Colorado look: beards, tattoos, a t-shirt emblazoned with the logo of some local brewery.
“Lovely!” I thought as the second guy examined the blanket. (Ok, maybe that wasn’t the actual word that went through my mind, but it was definitely the sentiment.) “I wonder if he likes it!”
Suddenly, the action intensified, and there was a lot of cursing. We were almost through the doors at this point, and I had a lot of mental catching up to do to rewrite the scene according to this new information. I tried to look without looking (and turning back to make sure that my son was proceeding in a quiet and undetectable way — “quiet and undetectable” being words that have never described him, or me for that matter — he actually was!) and noticed that the third guy had produced handcuffs and was proceeding to cuff the first guy.
Not a particularly dramatic story, but it revealed something very powerfully to me: we (and by “we” I mean “I”) absolutely see the world as a projection of our expectations.
What kind of life must I lead that I saw three scruffy guys emerge from Nordstrom with a dirty construction vest draped haphazardly over a bulky shape and thought, “Wow! A surprise gift!”
I mean, really.
It reminded me immediately of a second story, which I will always treasure, from when our daughter was about four.
We were having our parent-teacher conference with Linda, our beloved teacher, who was going through Sonia’s "work” (why did I put “work” in quotes?) and telling us about all of the incredible things she was learning in her magnificent Montessori classroom.
With a twinkle in her eye (Linda always has a twinkle), she pulled out a worksheet, saying, “I just had to show you this.” (I feel compelled to say that this was one of very few worksheets! But it was an instant classic.)
The paper was a grid, each box containing an image. A “star,” for example, with room for the student to provide the initial letters:
_ _ A R
Sonia had, of course, done a fabulous job all the way through.
Until she reached the second to last image, and was utterly stymied.
The picture (and this I seriously cannot believe had made its way into our perfect Montessori environment), which I can’t quite remember perfectly, was of a hand approaching a child’s body; the child was crying, as expressed by the three lines coming out of her mouth (sort of like this, but much more rudimentary and of a child clearly in distress):
The letters underneath were:
_ _ A N K
Sonia simply could not figure out what was happening in this picture, and — ever her mother’s daughter — Linda reported that Sonia becoming frustrated with herself. Linda came over and patiently talked her through it.
“What is happening in this picture, Sonia? What do you see?”
To which Sonia replied, “I think the kid is throwing up and the mom is rubbing her back.”
These stories came to mind as I read this wonderful interview with Vivek Murthy, our Surgeon General (the headline does not do justice to its scope; also, if you don’t subscribe to The Ink, you can read one article, I believe, for free. I did). This quote is actually part of an extended question, not Murthy’s answer, but I thought it was really illuminating:
My image of our political [situation] today in many ways is of people sitting on the street shivering and crying, saying, “I don't feel good.” And Democrats are going up to them and saying, “See, we're building a bridge right there. Right there, there'll be a bridge.” And the people are still crying. Shaking and crying. And they say again, “But this bridge is going to be amazing. It's going to have eight lanes.” And, actually, the bridge may well help those people. It's not that the Democrats are wrong that the bridge will help them, but someone else is coming over and saying, “Let me give you a hug, and let me explain to you why Mexicans did this,” and the problem is, you might well take that hug.
Our issues are complex, multitudinous, and interconnected. But in order to address them, we are going to have to deal with the fact that emotional intelligence — particularly our cognitive empathy — is just as important as implementing solutions.
My (probably very unoriginal) hot take is that we are, in many ways, an incredibly immature society. And that makes sense: America is, by all reasonable measures, still quite young, and probably in its adolescence.
Adolescents are brilliant and visionary, but they are also limited by their own inexperience and the heightened sense, shared by all of us, that they’re starring in their own movie. And they’re right: if you live with an adolescent, you may recognize that their presence has a high impact on the family dynamic. They may be quietly full of doubt, but also of clarity, righteousness, and conviction.
Moving towards maturity, which our culture has worked very hard to delay, is a messy process of becoming — as George Saunders said in a commencement speech, quoted in this wonderful essay by Alex Dobrenko — “counter-instructed in our own centrality.”
It is a messy, painful process. Learning that you are often not even “on-screen,” much less starring, can (and usually will) feel disorienting and disappointing before it becomes a liberating relief.
America is definitely becoming, in ways that are also quite alarming, “counter-instructed in [its] own centrality.” That doesn’t mean we are not important; we are just not (or, I guess, should not be) all-important.
In our own cultural tensions and through our engagement with the rest of the world, we need to recognize that we’re not all-seeing and all-knowing; that, quite obviously, our own cultural experience shapes and colors what we see.
I saw a guy presenting another guy with a gift.
Sonia saw a mom reassuring her child.
The Democratic Party sees bridges.
There is no way to get around this; we will always see through our own eyes. That is good! The problem becomes, I think, when we fail to see that we’re doing that, when we just assume, without checking ourselves, that what we see is all that’s there. When we can’t step out of ourselves and witness the reality of others, which would add dimension to our repertoire of understanding.
American democracy is a triumph, and was formed as a result, clearly (and to put it mildly and reductively) of a lot of self-reflection and soul-searching. What are our human strengths and frailties? What are our strengths and our blind spots, as individuals and as a collective? What mechanisms can we put in place to support the cultivation of the former and reduce the harm of the latter?
When everything is reduced to “with us or against us” — “us,” in this case, feeling like just the plural form of “me” — we become locked in a closed, depressing loop that centers ourselves. Within that framework, there is no room for surprise, discovery, understanding, life.
As Albert Camus said,
“The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn’t the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness.”
Clear sight, I guess I’m arguing, isn’t “seeing clearly straight out of the gate.” My life has brought me to the point at which I egregiously misinterpreted what I was seeing outside the mall.
I think that story shook me out of myself and reminded me, perhaps, that clear sight is, rather, the ability to question how and why we see what we see.
Maybe that’s what maturity looks like? And maybe when we do that, we’ll stop trying to comfort an ailing person with the promise of a bridge?