essaysbysean.blogspot.com
I suppose, dear reader, you have
noticed how twilight can be a bittersweet time. At twilight, on Sunday, I
skimmed some pages of a feature on loneliness in this month’s Oprah magazine. I found that social
connections are scientifically proven to add to various measures of health, and
increase our longevity… Oprah’s readers were advised to “Speak Up,” and then advised
to have a national “Say Hello to strangers” day for Oprah readers. The next
morning, on a fine Saint Patrick’s day, in a Calgary Metro column, Jeremy
Klaszus wrote of the “proven health benefits” of saying hello not only to
strangers and friends but to those in-between in the “blurry zone” such as the barista
whose name you don’t know, and the jogger you nod hello to every day.
Meanwhile, back in the Sunday twilight,
I reflected on the connections that day.
This Sunday, I confess, was an “off
day” for me. I had only done a little writing craft in the morning—normally I do
a lot over morning coffee, so the rest of my day can be guilt free. And I had
only done a little house cleaning—much remains. Finally, in the late afternoon I’d
driven to Bridgeland and walked about, but not nearly as much as I would
usually walk.
As I walked I was conscious
that—call me a Puritan—I usually try to make my days more productive. Below a
long hillside, on the big rectangular field where the city hospital used to be,
were young men and women in street clothes with superbly padded swords, arrows
and spears. They had identical round shields. Interesting. I could tell they
weren’t part of the Society for Creative Anachronism, but I didn’t bother
asking two bystanders what was going on; I didn’t sit on a bench to smell the
grass and see what would unfold. Usually I’m not so apathetic: As I said, it
was an off day.
Walking on the sidewalk this Sunday
I always stepped aside, well in advance, from any approaching groups of happy
dogs and their humans—without making eye contact: Which is unusual for me, here
in my small-town city. At last I looped back around to a Starbucks Coffee shop,
there to plunk down my pack at one of about a dozen little round tables. A bland
middle-aged man in a bland grey T-shirt glanced up at me twice as I came in: I noticed
him having the unmistakable body language I knew from my student days, saying,
“Let’s connect, stranger, and talk, to chit chat or delve into the meaning of
life.” But my sociable student days were behind me, and I was really having an off day… As for the
rest of the folks in that community coffee shop in the Bridgeland community,
they weren’t communal at all.
In fact, I was so struck by how
non-communal the place was that later, after the man had left and been replaced,
I recorded some statistics in my journal:
-The only folks conversing were a
group of four young dressed-in-black police constables with protective vests.
-As for the other tables, there
were no groups and no pairs, only nine solitary occupants, including me.
-Only two non-Puritans were merely
reading for pleasure: One was a middle-aged lady with a streak of brightly dyed
hair, reading a harlequin romance; and one was me, reading a “manga,” a
translated Japanese comic book.
-Three or four were intently focused
on using their laptops.
-Three or four were intently making
notes as they read.
-No one had a “social prop” such as
a newspaper with short articles, or notebook to sporadically write in (except
me, briefly) where one would be clearly seen as not minding interruptions.
-Most strikingly, everyone but me
had a stiff intent-on-what-they’re
doing, oblivious to their
surroundings, don’t-bother-me body language. Not communal, not at all.
As for me, while occasionally
making eye contact with a young police constable, I was having a good time
glancing around and grinning to read my manga: volume four of Haganai, I don’t have many friends.
That’s the series where the girl justifies being caught talking to her imaginary
friend: “If you can have an air guitar then I can have an air friend.”
The behaviors I noticed on Sunday were
all the more striking because it was a day where you would think we had
something in common lifting everyone’s spirits: There was water trickling in
the gutters, there was more bare ground than white—summer was rushing in! At
last! …Around these parts we don’t have spring.
Not everyone, I guess, knows how to
say hello to strangers. I have a pretty friend, Christina. How pretty? Let’s
just say I take too many photos of her. She has an equally pretty friend, “Hermione.”
Poor Hermione can walk for blocks without anyone speaking to her. Unlike Christina.
My friend connects with strangers because, she explained once, she has a light
body language and light roaming eyes. “I got that from you” she said. How nice.
I like to make her smile when we’re together by having fun talking to
strangers. It’s easy for we two, but not for Hermione, walking heavily with her intent
eyes focused straight ahead. Such a pity. I suppose “saying hello” means having
an inner state of being open to the world. Role modeling would work: I guess
Christina just relaxed and channeled her “inner Sean.”
Back when I was a young man I lived
in a wonderful shared house where no one thought I was shy—but I was, sometimes,
when away from home. Back then I read a book by Professor Phillip Zimbardo. I
remember his description of one of his students, in the cafeteria, nervously
cramming a cupcake into her mouth as someone walked by. After the professor’s
students asked him for help he wrote the first ever book on shyness. Zimbardo declared
shyness “is not dispositional but situational.” In other words, we can be
non-shy, even too talkative, in a situation with people we know such as our
immediate family… My conclusion: It would not be enough for Hermione, or the
folks in the Sunday coffee shop, to know how to say hello—They would also, on that
day, have to be willing.
I wish for all my readers to have
days when you don’t walk along with tired eyes, or a frown. I believe we all
have something to offer, such as small talk; we all can give a smile to lift up
a stranger.
And may you and I forgive ourselves
our off days.
Sean Crawford
On Saint Patrick’s Day,
Calgary (Cowtown) Alberta
2014
Afterthoughts:
~On Friday Judy and I went to explore
an art gallery in Inglewood. It’s four floors above Gravity coffee shop, in a very
affluent office tower with glass stairs. We made our way up, floor by floor,
past art at each level. Neat! Of course by the time we reached the gallery we weren’t
tired old baby boomers—if we ever were—we were alive, excited and approachable.
You enter the gallery through an airlock: a revolving door. As we hung up our
coats a stranger, a young artist dressed all in black, burst out that she liked
how my T-shirt was so nice for others to enjoy, saying she should wear ditch
her black for something friendly too. Wow—Trust an artist to see, and to speak
her truth. I advised her of an artsy French T-shirt I’d seen for sale down the
street in a new comic book store: How nice to make a connection! (I later
learned she had a generation Y name, Kaylin)
My shirt, by the way, had a detailed
Jurassic scene complete with a foreground brontosaurus arcing his long neck up,
up against pretty clouds.
~Back in the days when people cared
about status, Dale Carnegie said words to this effect: A woman’s expression is
more appealing than the fur coat on her back.
~Joss Whedon, best known for his
summer block-buster The Avengers, got
his start writing about a lonely high school vampire slayer in Sunnydale, and then
about a lonely refuses-to-drink-blood vampire in Los Angeles. Joss said,
“Loneliness leads to nothing good, only detachment.” Well. If in my grim old
age I detach, then I will no longer give-a-care about making small talk to
cheer up strangers: Yuck! … I prefer the innocence of youth, expecting I will
like others, and be liked.
~Related essays are Brights in a Grey Life, archived
December 2013, and Learning to be Nice,
archived May 2013.
~I'm getting a lot of hits on this one, but not for the two pieces mentioned above. Well then, specifically for how to be "saying hello" as a tourist talking to strangers, see my essay of July 2017
It's a good one, even if nobody asked for a part two.
~I'm getting a lot of hits on this one, but not for the two pieces mentioned above. Well then, specifically for how to be "saying hello" as a tourist talking to strangers, see my essay of July 2017
It's a good one, even if nobody asked for a part two.
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