Each Interaction

People continue to surprise me, mostly because I should know better by now. I sometimes can’t believe how much credit I give people. Even after years of telling myself that other individuals draw different conclusions from life (and why wouldn’t they, given their different experiences?), I get caught off guard.

Maybe I’m still living in the past. Perhaps I’m still basing my assumptions on what I knew of this one and that one when I knew them better (or at least interacted with them more often). Then, of course, there’s the training: the school mentality that drums the same beat into your head, over and over: these are the ones who know; they have the authority, the experience, the teacher’s manual—listen to them.

I once began all my blog posts with this reminder: Each day is new, with no mistakes in it. Take a picture. It has worked its way into my brain, and I am quite capable of accepting each new day with gratitude and the right attitude, but maybe I need to apply a similar philosophy to people. It might behoove me to consider each interaction as an introduction, as a chance to learn something new about someone.

Yes, thinking about people as I try to think about art, specifically literary works, might be a good strategy. While I find biographies interesting and like picking up tidbits about an artist’s or author’s life, I know that a painting, a novel, a poem needs to be given the opportunity to speak for itself. Sure, Flannery O’Connor was a wise and faithful Catholic, but are her books readable? Do they keep me turning the pages? Do they get under my skin and into my brain with something essential? Not sure. I still don’t know if Flannery’s work can carry on autonomously, and I suspect that many of her fans are fans of her, not of her stories.

Could it be that the question needing to be asked at the start of each encounter is not how are you? but who are you?