The Beautiful Answer

On Being Polite

Why is it that every time I go to Whole Foods, someone literally almost knocks me down trying to run to the conveyor belt at the check stand faster than me?  This has happened to me three times in a row, if you count today, and I’m not competing for anything. Really. This is just my regular speed, people. 

It got me thinking, when I was trying to figure out what could possibly make the person behind me, who shoved his stuff ahead of mine on the belt for some reason, want to rush that bad. On the streets of L.A., I expect this. We’re not the politest city in the world. But in Whole Foods? The bastion of awareness and enlightenment? Seriously? 

The thing is, being polite means being aware. It’s as simple as that. You need to be able to exchange your feelings for those of others, cultivate empathy, and get over yourself. Your needs can’t, by necessity, be more important than those of others. Unless you’re rushing to the hospital with a pregnant woman or a stab wound of some kind, I’m not sure why you’re acting that way. 

So to reframe this semi-permanent annoyance, I tried to tap into their needs. Maybe these people did feel that getting ahead of me, or someone else, was so important to their perceived arrival time (where, I wondered?) that they couldn’t risk the luxury of human interaction. It wasn’t working very well. 

Then I tried drawing an imaginary line between us, and meeting this guy halfway. I hung out like a neighbor at a fence, hoping to have a cup of tea and talk about it. In my mind’s eye, he kind of lolly-gagged over, thinking it was showing some kind of weakness to even engage with me. I saw in that moment that it wasn’t about being rude at all. It was about fear of connection, fear of looking someone else in the eye and dealing with them on that scary, vulnerable level. In essence, it was about social anxiety more than anything else. And even though it may not stop people from cutting me off in line at Whole Foods (I usually let them go ahead anyway), at least I understand it a little more, and that’s just polite. 

Are We Really Better?

Had to go to Office Depot again, since I tend to like to torture myself on Fridays. No, not really. I just unexpectedly ran out of ink on a day I had to print a million or so pages. So I headed back into the land of the zombies. And the guys were moving around the floor with this kind of look on their faces: 

(image courtesy of Spoon Graphics - www.blog.spoongraphics.co.uk)

At the register were two people, a man and a woman. The woman was helping someone, and I was next in line. The guy finished helping who he was helping, then walked away. I walked up to him and he said, “She’ll help you in a minute.”

I watched him walk over to a woman at a Xerox machine, help her center something on the glass (I guess she couldn’t figure out how to do that on her own), then disappear into the back. I didn’t really care about having a wait a few more minutes. In the long run, that’s not a huge deal. But he seemed to think that helping people was beneath him (confirmed by the woman at the register when it was my turn). So as she rung up my order, I began to think about that — the ways we feel that we’re better than other people, certain situations, or social groups, even better than certain jobs, as this guy seemed to be. I’ve worked with people like that, who seem to think that certain work is “women’s work” or “secretary’s work” or defined by whatever behavioral patterns they’ve picked up along the way. 

Since I can’t and don’t want to control other people’s stuff, the reframe for this was to not care, to visualize the entire experience as fluid, flowing through the store, into the parking lot, off my back and out of my life. In about three seconds, it felt like the moment was a hundred years old, way behind me. 

I’ll continue to think about ways I may believe I’m “better than” in the future. After all, I may notice a pattern in others because it’s something I do myself. 

But since it’s Friday, and Whole Foods’ turkey sausage pizza is like crack, I got my reward soon enough. Awww, yeah!