Tag: people

Wisdom from the Sage of the Water Store

What is a water store?

My friend’s feeling icky and flu-ish and the only thing she wants help with is refilling her 5-gallon water jugs.

So I discover there’s a thing called a water store. (Which my text editor is marking as a grammatical error. Does that mean it’s not linked to my GPS? I thought you all talk to each other.)

After seventeen questions more than appropriate for a place with exactly three types of spouts to choose from (the bottle washer, the normal water spout, and something that remains mysterious, even after all those questions), I lug two very full water bottles onto a cart retired from a respectable career transporting AV equipment across the local middle school, and I approach the register.

The cashier is a man with hair. So much hair. Hair down to below his chest, hair worn loose and curly, hair that is gray with some black and white mixed in.

“What are you up to?” he says.

“Just trying to help a friend. What are you up to?”

Perched on a stool, he tilts up his chin, considering.

“Drinking water,” he says.

“Eating pumpkin seeds,” he continues. And then:

“Taking it one gallon at a time.”

Do we care—or even notice—if someone says they’re taking it “one day at a time?”

But if, instead, we think about what a day means to us and talk about that?

Then, we form a bond with other people. We plant our words and ideas in their heads. We have a chance to affect how they think feel, and act.

Or maybe we just give them a two-minute anecdote to share with a handful of other people. (Hi!)

As for me? I’m trying to take it one early bedtime at a time. Or, well… starting tomorrow.

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This was going to be about how we relate to each other

We have a good friend over. We haven’t seen him in years. We talk, we laugh.

Okay, okay: I laugh.

BOOM. The neighbors slam their window shut.

In college, I had a friend who would say ridiculous things to crack me up, just so he could shush me (and make me laugh harder).

My laugh? It’s loud. Fact.

Not everyone is cut out to be my friend.

Still, what if all our neighbors want is some sleep? It is, after all, 10PM on Saturday night. Isn’t banging the window shut adding to the problem? Can’t they close the window without slamming it?

To be fair, maybe they can’t. I’m not sure we can.

I’m worried about passive aggressive neighbors, when we all just need to clean our window tracks.

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When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple (hair) to get my oil changed

I’m in a car dealership, waiting for an oil change since apparently cars now alert you when it’s time to go in. (I drove late ’90s and early ’00s cars for so long, I’m still getting used to this concept. A’s car, which is newer than mine, even tells him when his tire pressure is low, though I think it only kicks in when the pressure gets dangerously low.) 

I’m sitting in the coffee area next to a Filipina who is also a US citizen through her father.  She joined the Air Force to see the world. She’s been a nurse (and now manager) for about 40 years, and at the same hospital where A had his surgeries and hospital stays for about half of that. She used to work in cardiac surgery and spent a good half hour geeking out about how cool cardiac surgery is and telling me about how they do heart transplants and double-lung transplants and fish out blood clots, and how some of the procedures require inducing hypothermia to slow metabolism so patients don’t die when their hearts stop pumping.

She talks till they call to tell her that her car is ready. 

The subject matter is frankly a bit morbid, especially the transplant part, because you have to wait for someone to die in a way that doesn’t damage the organs you need and hope that they’ll be a match.

But for a few minutes, she shares something she loves in this world, and I learn something new and understand a bit better how this world works.

She leaves.

A few minutes later a woman in her 70s sits down. Short white hair with a cloud of magenta on top. She says, A lot of my friends dye their hair—brown or black—so I figured, why not. She does a different shade each time. Her hairdresser worried at first that this woman wouldn’t be happy with it, but now is into it (the hairdresser, too!). She says, I’m not dead yet. When I turned 70, I got a couple tattoos.

There’s something fascinating about this particular choice: Even as she changes her hair color, she’s embracing her naturally white color because magenta hair works on white hair in a way that it doesn’t in dark hair. It’s striking.

And these interactions, these choices, these things strangers share with us, whether through conversation or through a physical choice like hair color, give so much food for thought: Are we doing work we love? Are we taking time to notice the people around us? How do we want to see the world and our lives as we grow older? And how do we see ourselves today?

But maybe I ought to practise a little now?
So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised
When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple.

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Interactions at intersections

I’m on a main street, driving straight. You’re on a side street ahead of me, at the intersection with the main street. You want to turn right to go where I’m going, or maybe you want to cross my lanes and turn left, or maybe you want to go straight through, cross the intersection, and stay on the side street.

There’s traffic and a red light coming up. If I stop now, I can let you through. Or I can keep going and block you. 

Maybe I keep going because I don’t realize how little space will be left for you. Maybe I’m just thinking about other things. Maybe I stop far enough in advance to give you space to decide what to do next.

Does the person in the other lane stop? Is there room for you to turn right or left or cross the intersection?

Will you acknowledge any of us before you go? As you go? After you go? What about if I (oops) block you?

Will we smile at each other? Will we raise our hands, display our palms in a “thank you” and “I acknowledge your thank you”? Will we flick each other off? Will we slam our hands on the steering wheel because of the other person’s audacity to ignore our needs, whether or not we were in their line of sight? Will we realize we recognize each other and wave excitedly? Or will we note for the future to beware of drivers with the other person’s… style? 

 

Today, this is what happens:

I stop far enough in advance to give you the space you need to go where you want to go. The person in the next lane stops, too. There’s room for you. You acknowledge us as you pass with a thank you palm, a nod, a small smile. 

Will we see each other again?

Unlikely. 

But this happy little exchange? It makes me grateful for traffic.

And who can ask for more than that?

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Which person would you rather talk to?

One week last fall, I had two polar opposite customer service-type experiences. 

I went to a doctor at a reputable center—a specialist I was referred to with a specific but not urgent problem—and I spoke with someone in the collections department at the IRS about requesting penalty forgiveness.

One was kind, respectful, and caring enough to make sure I understood exactly what had happened, what would happen, and what I should do. He empathized. He was relaxed, spoke with a sense of humor, and gave me a clear understanding of how this phase in the process works. 

The other was a doctor.

The doctor did the minimum possible and after that shrugged me off, answered my questions obscurely and in brief, and tried to refer me back to the person who’d sent me his way. I resisted—I’d put a lot of time into this already, and thought perhaps there was a legitimate reason I was sent his way in the first place. And when, after repeated questions on my part, I finally understood something, he gave me a condescending, “Oh, you’re smart.” 

(I think you know that this is not the rule. I’ve been to wonderful doctors. And I’ve spoken to IRS representatives who don’t know what they’re talking about. And I’ve come across people who were neither wonderful nor horrible but had the self-awareness and honesty to respond well when probed for more. 

Here’s one story I like that illustrates the last of these:

My mother, years ago, had strange long-standing symptoms that were eventually diagnosed as hypoglycemia. Years before she was finally diagnosed, she had some tests done. The doctor said: “It’s nothing.” My mother (and here you’ll understand where I come from): “If it’s nothing, what is it?” The doctor: “If it’s nothing, then we don’t know.”)

But I think this goes to show that anyone, in any position, however theoretically unpleasant (I repeat: IRS collections) can be lovely to work with. To interact with. And our expectations are so, so low, that if you simply care enough to understand where your customer is coming from and to help her get where she wants to go—you stand out. You’re memorable in the best possible way. And we are ever grateful. 

For having called the IRS.

 

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The magic of everyday encounters

When I plan to meet someone sometime, somewhere, we don’t always follow up in the days or night or hours before. And then, as I make my way over to where we’re meeting, I wonder: Is this actually going to happen? Will the other person be there, or did I imagine this? Do we share the same reality?

And then, I arrive, and the other person’s there, or pulling up next to me, or arriving within minutes, and all I can think is,

Wow.

There are so many little things that have to line up for this meeting to take place. We have to commit to something and remember it (or record it and remember to check the record). We have to experience the same time and have the same understanding of place. We have to have a way to arrive and a desire to be there. We have to have nothing more important happen to make us forget this or to require our presence elsewhere. 

I feel the same way about the people I run into regularly in our neighborhood. What an act of faith it is to say, when you really mean it, “See you around.” “See you next week.” Trusting that something will happen because the earth revolves around the sun and the earth rotates on its axis and the moon waxes and wanes and L goes to the park on Tuesdays and J walks with his daughter on Thursdays. And if someone misses a week? There’s the week after. There are chance encounters by the check-out aisles at Trader Joe’s or while shivering in the produce refrigerator at Costco or in whichever aisle is most awkward for you, personally, at Target. 

We will meet. We will meet again.

And if we don’t? That’s the actual baseline. That’s what makes all the times we do see each other magical.

Unless we don’t like each other. Then they’re just annoying coincidences.

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What cancer taught me about our shared humanity

After A. was diagnosed with cancer, I began thinking of our experience as a way to better understand the human condition.

Pre-cancer

Before cancer, we never contemplated our mortality more than the average Joe or Jane.

For instance, soon after we returned from a trip Guatemala, an entire bus full of people fell off the side of a cliff; this led to several… minutes… of alternating shock and sorrow and relief over the next several days. (Is this callous? But how long do we usually spend contemplating events that are in the past and do not directly affect us, however horrifying they may be? How long did most people who found out about A.‘s cancer think about it?).

Our brushes with mortality were never significant enough to take away from our lives, to keep us from functioning. And so, even with our experiences, even with travel and actively seeking out other people’s stories, I was never really able to get, to really internalize, this key element of humanity:

Our existence is *quite* precarious

When A. was diagnosed, he said that we all have this hazard function, this probability of dropping dead on any given day; the difference was that now he was aware of it.

Or, as Nina Riggs tells it in The Bright Hour,

I am reminded of an image that one of my cousins—a woman who lost her husband to a swift and brutal cancer last year—suggested to me recently over email: that living with a terminal disease is like walking on a tightrope over an insanely scary abyss. But that living without disease is also like walking on a tightrope over an insanely scary abyss, only with some fog or cloud cover obscuring the depths a bit more—sometimes the wind blowing it off a little, sometimes a nice dense cover.

And now we’re aware. We can see all the way down. We may forget, we may intentionally put blinders on most of the time so we can function, but we’ve seen the abyss and have gotten to know the ridges near the top quite well. I think—I hope—this awareness is permanent, because it sure cost a lot to get it.

For me, focusing on our common humanity is what helps me put one foot in front of the other. Common humanity is about both what I can offer and what I better understand. Realizing, and remembering, that we can use our experience to show other people what this can be like, that we can demystify it a little, that we can generally be open and available so that one day when it happens to someone else our experience can support them a little bit—this, to me, is half of the purpose of this experience.

The other half is this: that through this experience of being a partner and caretaker for someone going through cancer treatment, I’ve learned a lot about mortality. About disease. And about struggles in life in general.

Empathy: An upside to contemplating mortality

I believe there’s a small set of things we want in life. The details vary from culture to culture and from person to person, but on a high level, the set of potential desires is pretty small: We want some level of security—physical, nutritional, financial, emotional, psychological. We want to be healthy, to be able to use and rely on our bodies and our minds. We want some kinds of freedom of choice. We want to have some variety of love and/or companionship. We want some of these things: meaning, purpose, to feel like we’re growing and making progress.  There’s more, of course. I haven’t thought this through enough to claim this is all. The specifics matter, but I believe that for empathy, the circumstances matter more.

And these circumstances: they are complex. They are nuanced. And they, much more than the desires, are often invisible. It’s easy to assume you know all about other people’s lives, but what allows us to empathize with others is realizing that we don’t know, making a point to recognize the potential for all sorts of nuance we can’t actually see.

Getting that, understanding that we all have these super-unique circumstances—that is one of the major, expensive lessons that I learned from cancer.

Could I have learned it another way? Definitely. Sure, this way was effective. The downside is that it comes with lifetime toxicity for my partner and a host of mysterious, to-be-discovered short-, medium-, and long-term side effects. Plus, you know, all the depression and anxiety and life-interruption and still not solving all our problems from beforehand. So I don’t recommend learning this way. Learn by talking to people. Read books. Try method acting. Work or volunteer somewhere. Don’t get cancer, okay? Okay. I’m glad we’re on the same page.

The understanding, the relating to others, is one of the reasons I like to tell people what I can when they ask—because there’s no other way of learning how other people live life and what they face, and of therefore realizing down the road that even if the specifics differ, you’re not alone in struggling. In facing mortality. In wondering how you’ll make it through the day.

The paradox is that the differing specifics bring us together. You can only share your perspective, but it is exactly that story that allows you to reach and teach other people.

What we all have in common is nuance.

Story time

A. went to a sushi restaurant in the spring. It’d been ages since he’d had sushi because the chemo compromised his immune system and raw fish isn’t recommended when you have no way of fighting infections.

He sat at the bar next to an older couple.

They married in the mid-1960s, so they’ve got to be at least in their mid-70s. They looked healthy, fit, young, happy, even joyful, out at one of their favorite restaurants, being treated to free dishes because it was the restaurant’s anniversary and they’re regulars.

They talked. A. mentioned he works at the university. The woman said that’s great, we need as many doctors as we can get.

Oh, but I’m not a medical doctor. I’m a professor… But speaking of doctors, the reason I didn’t eat sushi for a while is because I was going through chemo for a rare type of Hodgkin’s lymphoma. 

And guess what? She said she’s had Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma for nearly 20 years.

When the couple left, she grabbed A. by the shoulders and told him to look into the mirror every morning and say to himself, “I am at ease. I do not have this disease.”

Here’s what I like about this story:

First: A., who is normally an incredibly compassionate person, was seeing and sitting next to and talking to this couple. In the midst of struggling to go back to all of his life roles and responsibilities after just completing cancer treatment, he told himself they were happy and healthy and probably never had to face problems like his.

The reality appears to have been the opposite: this particular couple probably knew how to appreciate a good moment when they had it. Which is a reminder that you can never assume you know what other people have experienced in life, and also that it is possible to emerge from the depths of disease and struggle, even if they quite literally accompany you forever, and find ways to enjoy life.

Second: I grew up keeping a lot of things to myself or within my family. I thought it wasn’t appropriate to talk to other people about negative experiences, so I didn’t.

What I have found repeatedly through this experience is that you are often rewarded when you share. You tell someone else about your humanity, your past or present struggle, and amazingly, surprisingly, upliftingly, sadly, shockingly often, way more often than seems statistically probable, you will hear about someone else’s similar struggle. And then you are together for a moment.

Our shared humanity, remembering that we are in this together, that even the bad things bring us closer together, helps us make it through. It doesn’t make the bad things good. It doesn’t make them worth it. But you don’t have a choice about the bad things, certainly not once they’ve happened. So at least this: a reminder that there’s still water in the glass.

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