With lots of downtime in Höfn, one of the things I did was try to settle the romantic dilemma I’d blundered into a few weeks back. I was out of the highlands and there was no barrier to talking with my new friend, but I struggled with whether I should.
Eventually I wrote her a series of messages:
“So, I’ve been thinking. Lots of space and time to think, out on this weird island. It was fun doing that Zoom meeting with you. Intriguing to connect the face and movement with the thoughts and dialogue before. But I it’s no substitute for a face-to-face meeting.”
“Our physical distance is probably not going to change any time soon. If I was back home, I’d be putting together some kind of invitation for a picnic with you in a sunny park, because you’re very worth exploring. Someone as nifty as you deserves full attention. But I’m not there, I’m here, enacting a travel plan whose wheels I set in motion well before I knew you existed.”
“So, a real chemistry-testing date would be a long time coming. And if you’re newly dating, like I’ve been before, you might be feeling what I often do, which is a sense of overwhelming choice. There are so many different kinds of people! Personalities to bounce off, fun activities to try that your ex didn’t like, and so on! I imagine you could fill your dance card from 9:00am to midnight every day and still never get the whole variety. And given that … it doesn’t make sense to focus on someone so far away. One only has so much energy for these things.”
“I’m not saying I don’t enjoy corresponding with you – I very much do – but being limited to correspondence for such a long time might eventually get more frustrating than fun, and create weird expectations. I don’t want our connection to suffer that fate, but there aren’t any good choices. I think the only choice I have is to suggest that we pause things until I get back. I’m not declaring it quite yet, but the idea has been rolling around in my head for a few days.”
“How do you feel about all this?”
Ten minutes later I got a reply:
“That sounds right to me. I really like messaging with you but I am also actually trying to explore new possibilities right now. And we can’t progress beyond messaging so it makes sense to step back while that’s the case. I’m open to being pen pals in the meantime. I’m interested in your ongoing travels!”
And that’s the way it settled. I knew that stepping back meant drifting away from her, but it was the healthier choice. And better to make it deliberately than just let things fade into nervous silence on one end or the other.
Well, based on that list, the key factor in survivability is the ratio of sheep to people. The more sheep per capita, the better. But I think it’s praa-aa-a-aaa-aaabably more complicated than that…
That report has some really questionable ground rules. For one, it deliberately excludes any factors that might arise from a collapse of external supplies of fuels and materials to these places.
I’m sure you’re aware that Iceland is extremely reliant on industrial-scale shipping to bring in everything from fuel to light bulbs to nails. New Zealand to a similar, but lesser, degree.
But sure, go to Iceland to weather the apocalypse… And remain here, as the airlines and ports shut down, and no one in the rest of the wold bothers to restart them because tourism and banking are dead. Life will not be very comfortable, and probably not very long. Reykjavik will have to depopulate, after a brief period when the trucks burn through their fuel reserves, and then almost all of those people will move out across the landscape, starving as they go, chasing sheep around the highlands.
Geothermal heat is great, when you’ve got time to spend indoors. Not any more. Back to intensive farming, for everyone, as everyone gives a solid try at producing a years’ worth of food in weak sunlight and thoroughly eroded soil. The sheep and goats won’t breed fast enough, and the cattle are too hard on the land so they’ll be consumed almost instantly. The remnants of humanity will go back to cutting grass with horses, and watch as first-world comfort folds in on itself.
It’ll all be truly over when a water pump fails in a storm one too many times and the engineers discover they’ve run entirely out of bolts, and there is nothing anywhere on the island capable of generating temperature hot enough to reforge steel unless you try some truly daring metalwork in the midst of a volcanic eruption.
Before that happens you might try sailing away, except the Vikings already cut down all the trees large enough to build longboats.
Perhaps the moss is edible?
Frankly, in terms of short and long-term survival, my money’s on Texas. They have their own long-term supplies of fertilizer and fuel, the panhandle is extremely productive in terms of crops and cattle, their infrastructure is not nearly as abused by the weather as elsewhere, and (this is the important bit)…
… they are armed to the teeth.
Question
Since you’re hanging around in one place, have you made any new observations about the locals?
Answer
To be honest, no. In public areas the tourists tend to outnumber the locals by a big margin most of the time.
I’m sitting here at a service station that has a cafeteria and electrical sockets, getting some work done. Out the window I can see a car-washing area: Three parking spaces with spray hoses coiled up next to them. There’s a woman there with her 2020-ish Ford F-150 — the kind with the short-ass bed.
I’ve been watching her for a while. She rinsed her car, then applied some kind of spray-on cleaner, then applied a layer of soap with a scrub brush all around it, even climbing into the bed to get the roof, and crawling under to get beneath. Then she did another thorough rinse with the hose, then walked all around the car with two different spray bottles, spraying all the panels and windows.
Then she removed all the floor mats, sprayed them down, soaped them, scrubbed them, sprayed them again, and hit them with the bottles. Then she went over the mirrors and lights on the car with another sponge and soap. Then another full rinse. Then she got out a spraying brush on a broom handle, and scrubbed the rims, including all around the road-facing surface of the tires.
Then she climbed in the back and scrubbed the inside of the tailgate with a rag. She did not rush, and between intervals of writing code I looked up and looked at the clock, and noted that the whole routine took over two hours.
I couldn’t imagine any service station in America tolerating someone who wanted to use their water and parking space for two hours to completely hand-wash their truck. And from my point of view, the truck was already pretty clean when she started. So, was this a tourist being extra-super-cafeful about returning a rental vehicle in good shape? Or was this a local, doing a once-a-year detailing of their workhorse?
I’m no stranger to seemingly wasted time over-doing something. My bicycle is proof of that: I’ve put hours of obsession into every tiny component and piece of luggage on it. On the other hand, I can see it from here, sitting in my service station booth, and the frame is spattered with mud and caked grease, the handlebars are scarred, and some of the stickers are peeling off. And I don’t really care. It’s mostly aluminum, so it’s not like it’s going to rust.
Perhaps I’m seeing an example of Icelanders “taking care of their things” in a more Scandinavian way than their cavalier American counterparts. And perhaps it’s no surprise that, being an American, I’m on the side of the Americans in this case: It’s a damn truck. It’s designed to get knocked around and still last 40 years with standard maintenance; just don’t store it in the snow. The only thing you’re doing by using a hundred gallons of fresh water to wash the dirt off – and it rains all the time in Iceland by the way – is performing cleanliness to a local social standard.
But again: Tourist or local? I didn’t march outside to ask. So, I may not have learned anything here.
I did see this sticker on the bathroom door. I think it counts as local color:
“EMPLOYEES MUST CARVE SLAYER INTO FOREARM BEFORE RETURNING TO WORK.”
Question
What would you do for a living if there were no computers? Like, nothing more complicated than a pocket calculator? What would you do for fun? How would you socialize?
Answer
For fun, I would probably keep riding my bike, but regress to a tape collection and a bookshelf, and end up socializing a lot more in cafes.
I like to write, but if I was reduced to punching a typewriter and shopping my work around to publishers to find some kind of audience, I confess I’d probably just give it up for the most part. I don’t have the chops to make it in the print world. The vast majority of my words would become a rambling paper memoir crammed into binders on a shelf in my garage, read by probably one or two people on the planet at best, fulfilling their main purpose of giving me some way to complete my own thoughts by externalizing them. I really do like nailing down a thought. Perhaps being deprived of electronic transmission would force me to confront just how self-serving my writing habits are.
It’s a funny idea: Whether social media, blogging, or whatever variation you like, the possibility that our work is visible to some random anonymous visitor tossed our way by a search engine lends it a sense of legitimacy that we embrace at the subconscious level and don’t want to think about. I mean, if you spend two days composing a very thoughtful essay about something and post it, only to have the algorithm utterly ignore it, haven’t you really just spent two days muttering to yourself, facing a blank wall, and communicated with no one? Isn’t that appallingly dysfunctional? The vague promise of random future eyeballs prevents you from asking the question. It may even prevent you from doing something more socially fulfilling.
So, I don’t know. I do write these things for my own satisfaction. I need good external memory in words and images or I think I’d forget almost everything concrete, at this point — and I don’t want to forget. It’s something to do with my brain. I struggled with this as a kid and I struggle with it more each year. If computers vanished, this would be a lot harder. Same with photography, and music, and various methods of communication.
Perhaps I’d go back to writing people letters, in actual envelopes with stamps and plant cuttings and stuff in them? Not so bad…
The big issue in my case would be, how do I make a living? I’d probably decide to re-train as a schoolteacher, like my parents. It would take years but I’d enjoy the journey. And heck, I probably already have enough weird facts in my head to assemble a few lesson plans.
I awoke feeling refreshed. Perhaps it was the silence around me, perhaps the feeling of clarity from yesterday’s decision. Either way I was glad.
Sleeping bag got a little damp at the foot again. Time to dry it before packing.
What damp adventures lay ahead today?
Pricey, but given how hard it is to find salad greens in this country, I'll take it.
The light rain had continued all through the night, and the corners of my sleeping bag were damp again. I had about half an hour of relative sunlight with a constant wind, so I stood around eating a lettuce-forward breakfast, and the bag was mostly dry when I rolled it up. I had an actual room booked for tonight, so I could unroll everything in there to let the drying finish.
The few patrons around me had vanished in the early morning. With no other campers here, the site felt less like a campground and more like a tangle of animal paths and tiny clearings that I’d just wandered into. There were no markers to delineate spaces, and tall bushes crowded the sides of the road, which curved around continuously as if to avoid them. Perhaps that was true: Perhaps trees are so rare in Iceland that the locals would rather redirect a road than cut one down. If so, I liked it — even though I almost got lost on my way out.
The road squiggled on. When my phone caught a signal, I got an email update from my new okCupid friend. We were sharing meta-thoughts about dating. The rain had paused for the moment so I stopped on the shoulder and typed a response:
Yeah, in a dating context, I agree it’s not common for people to talk so much when they know they can’t meet in person. I have a funny question about that: What if we’re talking so much because the distance makes it feel safe? Like, if we can’t actually meet, maybe that lowers the stakes?
I certainly didn’t set out to make myself physically unreachable, and if I could teleport to where you are, I totally would. It would be easier to talk and it would answer important questions. So I don’t think I’m deliberately trying to keep things abstract … But it’s still on my mind.
What about you? Have you wondered about it? What if part of me being interesting is based on me being inaccessible?
Later in the day I got an equally thoughtful response:
As far as talking with you because you’re physically remote — it’s perceptive of you to ask. It’s not why I started talking to you. I liked your profile and saw an easy way to strike up conversation. I assumed that you’d be back in a couple of weeks, since it’s pretty unusual for people to be able to travel longer…
But yes, you being away does take the pressure off in terms of a face to face meeting. I don’t feel rushed. On the other hand it’s kind of a double edged sword because we’re learning a lot of background about each other but it exists in a vacuum. It seems like we’re pretty compatible on paper, but we could have zero chemistry when we meet in person. We could hate each other’s smells, or have totally incompatible proxemics.
She proposed that we try a video chat when I got to the hotel, assuming there was coverage. I said that was a fine idea. We were both curious to see how we’d react to each other in “real time”.
Also I had to look up “proxemics.” What an interesting word!
I stowed the laptop again and kept pedaling. Around the next corner I saw a delightful sign:
It’s called Þjórsárdal. It’s a reconstruction of a Viking farm based on the layout of an archeological site in the Þjórsárdalur Valley, which was buried under a thick blanket of volcanic ash when Hekla erupted in 1104. The eruption was not so sudden that people were buried – they had time to flee – but it was continuous enough that the entire area was rendered uninhabitable. Archeologists dream of this sort of thing!
The parking lot in Þjórsárdal was nearly empty. I just rolled the bike up and set the kickstand. Admission was cheap, but the lack of people also meant that most of the events and activities were cancelled.
I cued up the soundtrack to Skyrim – because I’m an incorrigible nerd – and walked slowly around, enraptured by the artifacts, the equipment, and the little informative placards.
The exterior turf construction was historically accurate, as well as the peg-and-hole interior construction, with the exception of the ticket booth and other modern areas used for running the business.
I was in the lodge house for at least an hour, reading everything and thinking deep thoughts about human lifespans and cultural transmission. What a cool place!
Eventually I ran out of stuff to stare at, and I knew I had a big hill to tackle and many more miles to ride, so I took a few photos in the parking lot and then got back in the saddle.
YES. MORE FISH...
After the hill I rode out across a plateau. The terrain around me felt a little more volcanic; less grassy. Rain started and stopped half a dozen times. Even if there was time to set my gear out to dry, the sun never broke the clouds for longer than a few minutes at a time.
In the distance I spotted huge power lines, and eventually rolled past a hydroelectric power station. Another (relatively) free modern resource for Icelanders, to go along with geothermal heat and clean water, though I imagine the up-front investment was huge.
It fit the larger pattern, really: Iceland has amazing potential for renewable resources but the up-front cost could not be met without a massive influx of cash, technology, and material from elsewhere. The picture of the country as self-sufficient is very carefully framed.
No wonder this terrain has been a substitute for alien planets in dozens of sci-fi films, of budgets high and low.
Eventually I reached the hotel. It was raining heavily when I propped the bike outside. The place was crowded, which was disorienting after my long solitary ride. Everyone indoors was walking around in slippers, or bare socks, or wearing shoe covers. Apparently there was a serious problem with tracking in the volcanic soil.
I turned both heaters on full blast and cracked the window, then laid my tent out on the bed. Like a gross-ass bike tourist I did my laundry in the shower, then shuffled things around to dry that as well.
Then it was time for my video chat with my new friend. Feeling weirdly nervous, I joined the hotel wifi and clicked the link.
As soon as my face appeared on the screen, she said, “Oh thank goodness, this isn’t some elaborate catfishing thing. You actually look like you!” I laughed.
She had been serious-looking in the photos. In real time, she smiled and laughed and took equal parts in sharing and asking questions. The give-and-take felt natural. I knew I was being a bit over-enthusiastic but I couldn’t help it; I was nervous. We’d only recently started talking, but she actually knew far more about me than anyone I’d been talking to in Iceland for weeks.
I only realized later that she seemed to be much more used to video meetings than I was. Her setup was composed so that she sat way back from the camera, showing her whole upper body, and she was reclined comfortably. The arrangement allowed her to express with their hands, and not worry so much about whether eye contact was constantly happening. Also, had she chosen that arrangement so I could confirm that she was the shape she claimed to be? My little hotel room was so small there was no way I could reciprocate.
We talked about the history of London, and the schedule of my road ahead in Iceland. She talked about the “times of antiquity” and how Europe had plundered other parts of the world to gather artifacts. She mentioned a book sitting over on her shelf, and recommended it to me. She’d only gotten partway into it because she’d been reading it during her dissertation time. She talked about Stephen Fry and some of his writing, and how her sister had accidentally run into him twice, and I mentioned his interview on Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me. She didn’t care much for that podcast – the format was too boring – but she always liked Paula Poundstone. Turns out we’d both seen her live in our youth. She recommended another podcast called “Behind The Bastards”.
We talked for almost an hour and there wasn’t a second of dead air, which was nice. I had to sign off though, because there was some business to deal with involving my father. We agreed to chat again soon, though I cautioned that I would be entering the highlands and video would probably not work for the next week. The whole thing was delightful; so much so that I instantly began asking myself: “Why are you so far away from this person? Why did you want to go on this trip anyway?” And that, after a pretty amazing day of riding that included a surprise tour of a Viking farm. I had a bit of whiplash.
Then it was time to switch gears again: I had multiple phone appointments with caregivers and healthcare workers. My father and his wife were both struggling with dementia and had multiple people providing different kinds of assistance, and they all needed to be coordinated, and they all needed to be paid through a recalcitrant insurance system, and at the same time I was trying to get my father evaluated so he could potentially move into an “assisted living” home and share an apartment there with his wife.
The process was seriously hampered by the fact that I couldn’t make outgoing calls on my phone from Iceland. I had to contact my sister, who would call the person I needed, then call me up, and merge us into a conference call. Then she stayed on the line making notes, which we sent back and forth in the chat. She couldn’t do the talking for me, because I was the only person who had “power of attorney” and could make decisions about my Dad’s life.
It was a whole lot of stuff about doctor reports, and paperwork filings, and therapy approvals, and lots of arguing over who was qualified to evaluate my father and what it would mean. It dragged out for hours. I was grateful for the time difference at least, since it meant I was catching all these people early in the workday before ennui set in.
When that was done, all I could do was drop onto the sheets in a dead faint, with my laundry arrayed around me. What a weird life I’m leading.
I was up and packing well after dawn, which was alright, because dawn had technically begun at 3:30am. I knew there would be trouble as soon as I looked at the side of the tent: The outside of the mesh window was a fluffy constellation of mosquitoes, dozens of them, perched and waiting as close as they could to the smell of fresh human inside.
I stared at them groggily. I’d managed a little less than six hours of sleep. Now on top of sleep deprivation I was going to be deprived of blood! I shook my first at them, which did nothing. I smacked the mesh and a few of them moved, then quickly landed again. Oh well, nothing for it. At least the day’s riding would be relatively easy.
As soon as I stepped out of the tent my head was encased in a furiously buzzing cloud, and I instantly began scrabbling at my face. I ducked back inside and grabbed my wool hat and rain hood, plus my sunglasses. The buzzing cloud reformed a few inches in front of my nose and laid siege.
The little jerks were plentiful but not as sneaky as the ones I’d met in Alaska. Around me I noticed adults were stepping out of tents and cars and immediately breaking into a run as they went for the bathrooms. Nearby I saw a woman pick up her child and jog him over to a washing station. It took her just a few seconds to wash his face but before she finished he was crying in terror and waving his arms ineffectually at the bugs. I realized that I was one of probably two or three other people in this whole crowded campground who would think “Oh, these aren’t as bad as that other place I’ve been…” and that almost made me laugh.
I secretly hoped the guy who harassed me the other night was itching all over. I also gave thanks to my pee bottle, which saved me at least one trip outside into this madness in the early morning.
I disassembled and packed the tent with extra speed. On my way out of the campground I looked around again for a place where I might pay someone for the space, but saw no signage anywhere, and none of the buildings looked prominent enough. Had I wandered into the middle of some other event, for which people had purchased tickets elsewhere? I noticed that all the inflatable rides and toys I’d seen on the way in were now deflated. Was the event over, or would they start back up again?
I shrugged and turned the bike onto the main road. The bugs were still harassing me, but as I got up to speed, the cloud swapped out for progressively smaller clouds and then dispersed entirely. Always good to be back in the saddle.
Sunlight breaking through just around the mountain slopes.
Sunlight breaking through just around the mountain slopes.
I descended some short hills, stepping down into a valley. The cloud cover stayed with me but there was no rain. Each mountain pushed up through the clouds, leaving a narrow gap along the slope, which illuminated the hillsides in the distance even as the valley stayed in perpetual shadow. It was strange light.
I passed fields of grass, with occasional horses roaming around. A few stared curiously at me from behind wire fences as I sailed by. I always hoped they would start running along the fence and follow me for a while, because it’s quite enchanting when that happens, but none of them were inspired today.
As I turned south and headed closer to the coast, the air grew colder, so I stopped to add some layers. I strolled around a bit to help my circulation.
That’s when I noticed the bridge. It crossed a small ditch and then pointed directly into a tangle of weeds. There was no path I could see. What was this all about?
This bridge apparently leads straight into a thicket.
Well now. This was not something I expected to see today.
I had a lot of thoughts about this. One was, my cat Mira is getting old, and it would be nice to lay her to rest in a place like this when the time came, where the site could be marked and remembered. It couldn’t be Iceland of course. It would have to be closer to home.
Another thought was, a place like this couldn’t really exist back in the city I called home, because any use of space would be subject to an encyclopedia of regulations, some of which would require money. One possible exception might be the weird wasteland of the Albany Bulb, but even that would be a tenuous negotiation with artists and traveling campers.
The redwood forest where I spent my childhood might be able to conceal a pet cemetery. In fact it might conceal one already. I could bury Mira there, but it wouldn’t be appropriate: Mira never lived in the redwoods. She was born in Santa Cruz, in the crawlspace underneath a house. I suppose the best place for her would be the back garden of her current residence in Oakland. She loves that garden.
I felt lucky to have seen this little memorial to beloved pets. I took my photos and then pedaled on, carefully storing the memory so that it didn’t grow too heavy and make me homesick for my little fuzzy cat and the sunbeams under the avocado tree. I could see that later. She’ll be on the Earth for a while yet.
Warning: Big trucks parked really badly across the whole dang highway, ahead.
Soon I passed a roundabout, and the traffic got crowded. By the time I crossed the Ölfusá river on a two-lane bridge, the cars were actually wedged bumper-to-bumper, stacked up across the bridge and down to another roundabout just inside the city of Selfoss. I suspected a lot of the drivers were tourists who didn’t quite trust their instincts on a roundabout.
I rolled past all that, and up to a local cat, who was perched on the sidewalk and staring at the tangle of cars with a bored expression. I imagined it was employed as a town greeter and paid every evening in fish.
I was a bit curious about this place but skipped it in the end.
I got a late breakfast and coffee in a cafe next to the roundabout, tucked into a small table among a crowd of tourists, mostly fellow Americans. Then I rolled down the road to my hotel room and checked in, and stowed my gear. I decided to spend an extra day in Selfoss because my rear brakes were giving me trouble, and I didn’t want to over-use my front brakes and end up with none.
With the bike safe behind a locked door, I set out on foot to a second cafe.
The two skulls are the owners of the bakery, cackling over a treasure chest of bread!
So this is where Nick keeps his ice cream!
A weird reminder of home, hanging on the bakery wall.
Then I walked uptown and bought soap and milk and KFC sandwiches. Depending on how the repairs went, I might spend all the next day squirreled away in the room.
A hundred years ago, when international travel was rare and difficult, everyone considered “race” and “geographical origin” interchangeable. In modern times we’ve driven a wedge between these things and started to whittle down the importance of “race” as a carrier of behavior and value, which is a positive change. This change is not comprehensive though. People with the same origin but a different appearance are still treated quite differently, within their own communities.
Some of this is inevitable, because stereotypes are a very natural shorthand. They’re how we operate in communities larger than a few hundred people, where it’s impossible to personally know everyone we meet. A cab driver can be expected to know the traffic. A frail senior citizen would appreciate your seat on the subway. An angry-looking man in a giant shiny 4×4 is probably not a defensive driver. If that man has a bumper sticker reading “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN,” he probably doesn’t march in Pride Parade. Et cetera. Without stereotypes, society couldn’t function in real-time.
Stereotypes become even more obvious when we travel. If I meet someone from Saudi Arabia I am fully prepared to assume they pray to Allah multiple times a day, because that’s what modern sociology has prepared me to assume. If I think of the Vikings that sailed around in the North Atlantic, I think “socially conservative, environmentally destructive, and violent in their settling of disputes,” because that’s what historians have repeatedly told me. And despite knowing that people from different places can be all shapes and colors, if you asked me to picture these people in my head, I would conjure up specific clothing, facial hair, and skin colors.
And that’s where things can go sideways, because that’s where “race” gets involved.
I think we should all continue to drive that wedge in, between race and stereotypes, to reduce friction in our connected world. But how do we do that, on our own personal scale?
If I meet a Black man on the street in Oakland, I bring to bear a decades-long and complicated accumulation of assumptions about how that man perceives me, how other people who look like me have treated him, and how I can present myself so as to show I am not bound by those assumptions and will treat him with dignity and camaraderie. It took quite a while for me to be aware of that baggage of stereotypes, not just on an intellectual level by reading about it in a book, but on a behavioral level from living in Oakland. Sorting through the baggage I kept asking myself, “how can I act that actually helps?” I wanted to act in a way that would move the interaction beyond the fear and suspicion and get somewhere else. I didn’t want to just signal that I was what people used to call “woke”. That would make the interaction about the stereotypes, or even about me.
Sometimes I’ve asked myself, in this kind of situation, would it be better for both of us if I was completely unaware of any stereotypes, like my young nephews generally are? Then I would be guaranteed to treat him like anyone else. A little bit yes, a little bit no. It’s likely I am more helpful when I see what we’re all working against. Plus I can avoid saying or doing something stupid by accident.
Like, say, excitedly asking the Icelanders I meet if they can teach me how to forge a sword and build a longboat.
Answering the question of “what helps?” is often difficult, but I find that a good place to start is with another question, “what do I have to offer?” Sometimes the answer is, your social standing is what you can offer, by finding a way to make it transferable.
An easy example: Several jobs ago I was asked to collaborate with a group of software developers, one of whom was a Black man, a first-generation American whose family was from Morocco. Where I live, it’s extremely rare to meet a software developer of that ethnicity. He was shy, very hard to read, and kept his head down in design meetings, but he could write good code. It seemed like he had grown used to being kept at arms length by other developers, and felt that since he would inevitably be marginalized, why fight it? Since I was joining the group in a lead capacity, I had a chance to do something about that.
We worked together one-on-one for a while, establishing some trust. A month later I began to deliberately defer to him for advice during meetings, which raised his social standing just a little bit to the rest of the group each time. Eventually he was comfortable making arguments and presenting his work just as often as everyone else, and I was glad for it. It didn’t just make him more comfortable, it made all of us better at our jobs.
(As an aside, there are people who will actually try to denigrate this sort of action by declaring me a “white savior.” I poked at that for a while and found there was a reasonable conclusion: Those people are jerks!)
Sometimes the thing we have to offer is subtle, like social credit. Sometimes it’s immediate, like protection from physical harm. (That’s come up for me a bunch of times, being out and about in Oakland.) Sometimes it helps just being a witness in a sketchy situation so we can make sure the truth is told later, anywhere from a traffic stop to a classroom to an argument in the street. What’s especially great is that when we move outside our comfort zone to elevate someone else, we are also expanding the range of who we feel comfortable with internally. So, we improve ourselves. We decrease the chance that we might unconsciously be part of a problem.
This is a fine effort. But you know what it demands? Security.
People who do not feel safe – physically, financially, socially – are in less of a position to take risks extending help or protection to people they don’t know, especially people who might respond unfairly. And that means, when you can – when you feel some security – you’ve got to meet people more than halfway.
That’s a lot to hold in your head, when the pace of life and the immediacy of social interaction make things shift around you. Don’t stress yourself out even more by involving guilt. Just think about what you might have to offer in a situation.
Oh, and I suppose this is a bit ironic given where you’re reading this, but … why waste your time signaling virtue online, when you can go outside and have it?
