My generation’s motto was “Let it all hang out.” We had lived with too many secrets. Maybe Watergate was the last straw. We talked about things. We told people what we thought. Some of that was fine, but not all of it. Some of us were chastened when we read Sydney J. Harris’ remark in the paper a few years later: “If you find yourself in the habit of being brutally frank,” he wrote, “you might ask yourself if the frankness is an excuse for the brutality.” We weren’t trying to be unkind, or rude. Far from it. We were looking for the truth about life. We just forgot, or didn’t know yet, that truth is plural.
* * *
One of my clients wanted to meet somewhere not too busy on a Sunday and so we chose one of the nicer hotels in town. The manager helped me find a quiet table and then said, “Thank you, Madame.”
I usually say, “Mademoiselle, s’il vous plait,” if the person is French. He wasn’t, so I told him what I usually tell my compatriots: “Call me Laynie.”
He’s British, as it happens, and what he said next stopped me in my tracks. He said he preferred to call me “Madame.”
Of course I asked why. And we talked for a few minutes–thank goodness my client was late–about service. We’ll call him “Robert.”
Robert spoke clearly and beautifully about why he thinks formality is so important in his industry. He said it allowed his guests to have their own experience, without the person serving them intruding. He suggested that otherwise the server becomes a character in what should be a private story. (He also told me of a restaurant he knows and loves that others find cold, because the people that work there are reserved. Once he explains the situation to his friends, some give it another try.)
Years ago I would have taken the way Robert addressed me as a put-down, and the way he viewed proper service as matter of devaluing the server, preserving social class. I might have even invoked his land of origin to prove my point. All those colonies, don’t you know.
But now I knew something I didn’t know at twenty, when some (not all) of our professors encouraged us to call them by their first names and we drank together at parties and thought we were all friends—until later we needed to ask for their help and the metaphorical phone line went dead.
I knew Robert was onto something, and I asked him to tell me more. Then I told him of a favorite restaurant of mine that used to exist around the corner from where I live. The proprietors were European, and would say things like “So nice to see you again, my dear,” and other things that made me feel, at times, like a bit of a stranger.
“I’ve been coming here for a long time,” I remember thinking. “Why do they still keep me at a distance?”
Then I realized this was how they treated all their guests. And I began to enjoy it.
* * *
When the WikiLeaks story broke the old me, the college-aged me, would have joined with the many that were purely delighted.
“That’ll teach ’em!”
But by now I was a person in whom people confided. Clients tell me their business ideas. Friends tell me their dreams and their despair, what their loved ones have done or haven’t done. We tell each other things that will never see the light of day.
I also have been wanting to beef up my Hebrew and learn Arabic, so I’ll be able to read the Mideast papers in the original language. Because I have learned that politicians often say one thing in English and something quite different in their mother tongue.
In a private moment after he had given a talk, after offering my condolences I asked a man whose son had been killed by a terrorist if he thought he would ever consider meeting with someone from that group. He said “I didn’t say this, but yes.” Then he said some other things that surprised me and also gave me hope.
If you take a moment to think about it, diplomacy can only work if people can talk behind closed doors. If they don’t “let it all hang out.” (This doesn’t mean that I’m in favor of secrecy. I’m not. But if you say, “Discretion is the better part of valor,” I’m with you.)
Who would want a world that existed only on the surface? One of the wonderful things about Francois Truffaut’s movies is that when we enter a given scene the people are often already talking, and continue to do so as he cuts away. This reminds us that there is both a public and a private conversation.
* * *
After my client left, I stayed at the table enjoying the surroundings for a bit. Robert was leaving. I said thank you again, and we resumed our conversation for a moment. Suddenly he said that he had a question for me. I had told him that I do creativity development but, even so, once again what he said took me by surprise.
“How,” he asked, “do you drive passion?”
I told him the truth—well, one truth, right? You can’t create passion. But the good news is that you don’t need to create it, any more than you need to make people creative. Passion and creativity already exist in every one of us. But they get squashed, in a variety of ways. I made some suggestions as to how he might help his staff access theirs.
So we had come full circle. And the college-aged me, had she been allowed to speak, would have said, “See? He’s admitting that you know something he doesn’t know. So you were right all along. The heck with form.” (She would have said it more colorfully than that.)
But today I know something different. She’s only partly right. Sure, there are things I know that Robert doesn’t, and things he knows that I don’t. What he reminded me that day was we need always keep the context in mind. We choose our words and actions, or should, according to the demands of the situation.
I used to hate the word “appropriate,” thinking it was used to dismiss people who might be different from the norm. But today I’m just fine with it. It’s a cousin to “apropos,” at least in my mind. To say something apropos is to choose the right word, the necessary word. And somehow it makes me think of “appreciate,” too, and that gets me thinking about the French word “apprivoiser,” which is what The Little Prince, Saint-Exupery’s beloved book, is all about. “Apprivoiser” is sometimes translated as “to tame” or “to domesticate,” but in the French, at least in the book, the word doesn’t have that feel to it at all. It’s more like this: Imagine you’re on a plane, and the landscape below is just coming into view. Things begin to look familiar. Yet it’s a new place you’re visiting, so you take your map with you (reminding yourself it is another country), and you look and listen as closelyas you possibly can.
(Originally published in “From Strength to Strength,” ideasmadereal.blogspot.com.)
©2011, 2014 Laynie Tzena. All Rights Reserved.
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