You Go First
This rainy, dim Monday morning, I missed my train. So Idrove in; I park outside downtown and take a short shuttle trip when I drive and don’ttrain in. And as I boarded the shuttle this aborted-train morning, the shuttlehad been sitting there a while, waiting to fill up. And full it now was – no seats.Mostly women were onboard, with their myriad bags. I don’t travel light, myself,but I am used to walking and toting my stuff, so I was slung with bags that arewell-balanced and in their proper places for standing and walking, but notreally sitting. Thus I was prepared to just stand and hold the ceiling rail,which was admittedly a fair distance above my slightly short stature. However,an older man – one of two males on the shuttle, and he was not elderly, justsalt-and-pepper haired – stood and told me to sit.
It’s a complex set of factors that whir at light speed throughthe modern, independent woman’s mind when presented with these kinds ofcircumstances. It is gender roles and ageism-issues and chivalric attitudes.For this woman, it’s also rational considerations, like this gentleman waseasily six feet plus tall, and I am not quite five and a half feet high, so theceiling was easily within in his grasp and less so mine. I sat.
It turns out this was also about reciprocation for me. NPRdid a story in late November 2012 about the societal “rule of reciprocation.” (http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2012/11/26/165570502/give-and-take-how-the-rule-of-reciprocation-binds-us) Essentially, this drilled-into-children ruleinsists that we are obligated to give back to others in the forms of behavior givento us, and every culture in the world practices it. So, for example, here inthe United States we feel compelled to smile in return when someone smiles atus, and when we do not, things might feel unbalanced. It’s at the root of that modern-fableof pay-it-forward, and given the sociology research performed aroundrules-of-reciprocation, a driver of some pretty deep compensatory exchanging.
Since I fancy myself a writer and thus do a fair amount ofmaking up stories in my head, during the time it took to go from parking lot tomy shuttle stop, I daydreamed that simple, increasingly-archaic gesture of chivalryto a fanciful vignette, wherein something unfortunate occurs aboard or to theshuttle, and by this man’s simple give-up-his seat gesture, he is now on myradar for assistance should calamity befall us. I already valued his existence overthat of the other passengers. Presumably, I was on his radar as well; weexchanged more than one smile as he stood over me, and I admit I felt a bizarreand inexplicable kinship with him – a man I had never seen before and likelywill never see again. It is powerful stuff, this human programming.
This reciprocal exchange also surely feeds the lesser “angels of our nature,” however: ourroad rage, wherein we tailgate the tailgaters, flip off the non-signalers, and cutoff those who cut us off. Maybe it fuels feuds with neighbors over tree limbsand barking dogs, feeding the generally unpleasant patterns we get into withvarious players in our lives. And not only for those we see only once, but alsothose people we can’t seem to treat with equanimity … parents, friends,siblings. For those longer-standing connections, it is certainly also fueled byhabit, by consistently poor communication patterns. But what started it off sobadly? What if all that long-standing failure to communicate properly roots insome badly-generated original action between persons? Suddenly, the term ‘badblood’ has new resonance in this light. Who nicked whom to draw first blood?
Who goes first, in the good and bad we give each other? Ifeach party is relying on the other for tone and tenor – to keep reciprocatingin kind – how does something bad ever become good? That seems a rather obviousanswer, doesn’t it … one person has to make that change. But who goes first?What motivates the effort to change the offering? And for those that do makethe choice to change, how big is the gamble that the change will be recognizedand also recognized in kind? Because who among us hasn’t learned the hard waythat what starts bad usually remains that way.
It’s hard being human.