I had a strange experience yesterday, and it made me think deeply about what I really want out of my interactions with other people. It was also funny as hell. Here’s the scoop:
We are in a campground right now with many other fulltime families and so the kids tend to be at various campsites playing with other people’s kids and often scattered throughout the campground.
I was walking to one such campsite to let my son know it would be time to return home shortly, and in order to get there, I cut through part of someone’s campsite to avoid going 100 yards out of my way carrying a squirming baby.
For those of you who don’t know, it’s a small violation of campground etiquette to walk through another person’s occupied site, but in this case, the site was quite large and appeared to me to be almost no-man’s land (or even an empty site) between them.
Furthermore, in this case, the man in question was actually in his front yard in a tent/gazebo thing he’d erected outside his motorhome. He was a short man with mussed grey hair and a grizzled face. He looked grandfatherly and was in the process of petting his small fuzzy black dog.
Thinking all this pointed to friendliness in a fellow human being, I waved and smiled and called out a cheerful, “good morning” to him with the intent of engaging him in polite small-talk and reducing the offensiveness of my infraction.
You may have guessed this by now, but in case you haven’t… it didn’t work.
Indeed, the mere fact that I was speaking to the man seemed to incense him and he replied to my “good morning” with a grouchy, “So. Where’s YOUR front yard?”
Noting the barely concealed contempt in his tone, I did what I normally do in these situations: I played dumb. I’ve found it works better to never respond immediately to the emotions you THINK someone else is having. After all, maybe I misunderstood. Maybe he’s having a bad day because his goldfish of five years (Molly) has just recently passed away. Maybe he just lost a bet. Maybe the Superbowl just didn’t go his way. Who knows, right?
And so I responded, “Oh, I’m actually in a cabin, so I don’t have much of a front yard right now. I’m over that way (pointing) by the canal.” I hoped this would deter him from his tirade… but it didn’t.
Undaunted, he came back with, “I just want to know where YOUR front yard is so I can come and walk through it.”
My hope for any pleasant exchange with this person was rapidly diminishing. I was reluctant to let it go however, so seeing that my infraction would not go unnoticed, I simply smiled and said to him, “Have a nice day!” I naively thought that would be the end of it.
Now bear in mind, I am carrying one of the world’s most adorable little redheaded babies (I may be biased) and this should have bought me some “cuteness” points. I greeted this man with a smile and an offer of conversation. I’ve stayed cheerful in the face of what seems to be unreasonable opposition.
None of that mattered to him.
As I continued reading the email I had been working on when we approached his site, he continued to shout after me, “That’s pretty rude! Just walking right through someone’s space! Hey! Get your nose out of your phone and enjoy nature!”
There may have been more, but I couldn’t hear him after that as I’d moved too far away. I did not look back or re-engage.
I didn’t say this at the start, but I had been having a hard morning. I had a strange malaise for no apparent reason, and I was feeling very fragile. It took a lot for me to cheerfully engage a stranger that day and to get that sort of response affected me more than it otherwise would have. I’ve spent the 24 hours since considering how and why it affected me so deeply.
I wanted to weep. I wanted to throttle him… while weeping. I wanted to shout at him, “How can you treat another person so cruelly?”
In the scope of things, his behavior was maybe what we would call (as a society) mildly rude right? Maybe even just “rude” without the adverb. But he wasn’t crazed. Or violent. Or even particularly belligerent.
And THAT is the sad part. It isn’t uncommon. There was an opportunity that I and this stranger had. An opportunity to engage as two humans sharing the common experience of being human and alive and in this particular place at this particular time. Of traveling down the road in a house on wheels and enjoying the natural beauty that usually surrounds us. Instead, he chose to be offended that I was infringing on his space. A space that wasn’t even clearly defined or obvious.
But rather than seeing the potential for connection, he saw an opportunity for offense and scooped it up and relished it and made it dark and hot and bitter and swallowed it whole.
He believed himself justified in crushing another human being to protect his rights. Was he right? Maybe. I honestly thought that I was walking through a different empty site (until I looked back and saw that it wasn’t). Does it matter? Did I do harm to the gravel that my shoes trod upon? HIS gravel? Was my smell offensive to his nose?
Why do we do this to each other? It’s not always so overt. But it happens. People reach out for connection all the time and are swatted away by others who either aren’t paying attention or are too wrapped up in themselves to see.
I’ve been guilty of this so many times (sorry my love!).
I’m going to take this opportunity to burn this feeling of rejection onto my brain. To remind myself that this is what I do when my kids bring something to show me and I brush them aside or correct them. When my wife is trying to share and I cut her off without really hearing.
Not because I’m beating myself up with guilt. But because as silly as it sounds, it really hurt when a stranger rejected my “good morning.” And I want to own that and let it inform how I treat other people.