I’ve been thinking about people as I travel. Not people I know, but people I interact with, specifically, people in the “service” or “tourism” industry. This started, on my first day here, when I asked my friends how I should “interact” with the people who worked for them. They work for the embassy so they have a driver, a cook, two nannies, a gardener, and a house cleaner. I know, it seems like a lot of people but there are two things I have discovered about this. First, my friends work ridiculously long days and often have to stay at work to respond to some political situation. Watching them and the hours that they keep, I actually don’t know how else they could maintain a house with three children if they didn’t have all this help. Second, it’s just custom here, it’s what people do, people work to keep up other people’s houses.
But for me, this is awkward. It feels weird to have someone do something for you that you can do yourself. I was mostly nervous about the cook and the house cleaner the first day. I was pretty sure that I would want a bowl of oatmeal for breakfast and also pretty sure that I would be waking up long after my friends and their kids had had their breakfast. I asked my friends about this, about when was a good time to be out of the kitchen and whether or not I should let the cook make me a bowl of oatmeal… “Just do what you would normally do- come downstairs and get what you need from the kitchen, ask her for help if you need it but don’t do anything different,” my friend explained.
I didn’t do any of that. Instead, I snuck down at 5 am, made myself a bowl of oatmeal, and brought it back up to my room to eat all by myself. I stayed in my room for most of the morning, but I knew I had to emerge at one point so I timed it to when the boys got home from school, so I’d have a bit of distraction from interacting directly with the nannies and myself.
I came downstairs and reintroduced myself to the nanny I had met the day before. I got kind of nervous about what to say or do but then I remembered what my friend had said, “Do what you would normally do,” so I asked her where the boys were, and went and hung out with them.
We spent the afternoon together; occasionally I would interact with the driver, the other nanny, or the cook and often, we would run into awkward situations: do I clean my snack dishes or do I leave them in the sink, do I open the door for myself or do I wait for the driver to do it, who steps in when one of the boys doesn’t want to put on his swimsuit for swim lessons? I can’t say that I figured this out. There were definitely times when it was awkward, where I stammered or halted, frozen as I attempted to determine the “right” thing to do that would respect boundaries and roles. But there were other times where I just engaged in the activity or interaction and let each of us do whatever we were going to do at the time.
I think that the difference in these interactions, what made it easier or more fluid, was when I stopped looking at these people within their roles, when I started seeing them just as people, who were doing the same thing as me: taking care of the kids, cleaning up the dishes, getting the kids to swim lessons. My focus moved to the event in front of us, and away from focusing on what I could do that was ‘appropriate’ given our different roles in the situation. It wasn’t about the roles, it was about the person in front of me.
This has spilled over into my travels up to the northern part of Myanmar. I got a sweet deal on a fancy tourist package so I have been staying in some swanky places. These are full service hotels, apparently aimed to make you feel like a king. You are constantly met by people who do stuff for you that you could easily do yourself, and it has made me really uncomfortable, but it has been a good dharma gate for me too.
At dinner the first night, I noticed that as soon as I finished the water in my glass, the man standing within a five foot perimeter of my table, would refill it with the bottled water at my table. It was weird for me to have him fill up my glass, like he had to serve me, like I was more important than he was or something. So I decided that I would only drink my water down to a certain point, so that he wouldn’t be able to come and fill it. But then I looked at the ridiculousness of the situation, how I was playing a game of control with this guy, all because of my issues around privilege, or whatever it was that was making me so uncomfortable in the situation. “Just let the guy fill your water,” I told myself. “You’re the only one who’s seeing this as some unequal master/ servant relationship. All this is, is a job for him. He’s going home after this, eating his own dinner and filling his own water bottle, this isn’t his sole identity (and I realized later, neither is it mine). Let him do his job, don’t insult him by trying to do it for him. ”
This showed up in my conversations with people who worked at the hotel as well. People are constantly asking you “How are you?” or “Are you enjoying your stay?” or “How is your meal?” or “Where are you from?” I always felt like this was part of these people’s jobs, that they were doing this because they were supposed to, that it was a reinforcement of the creation of an atmosphere in which my every need was taken care of, in which I felt that I was the sole focus of the interaction. But I’ve been trying to approach this differently. I’ve been trying to see the person talking to me as an individual person, instead of that-woman-in-the-lobby. When each person asks me “How was your day?”, I answer honestly and then ask how their day was.
And you know, the first few times that I tried this, I learned a lot about myself. Because the funny thing was, the people answered me as genuinely as I had asked them- and then I was stuck. I realized that even though I thought I was genuinely asking how their day was, I actually wasn’t doing that. I was asking because I wanted to decrease my anxiety around this, I was trying to ask it so that I could remove the imbalance between us, not because I genuinely wanted to know how their day was, I was actually still seeing them in their roles. But just like we always learn, others are our best teachers; having people sincerely tell me about their day brought me back to the real point of all of this, meeting people as they are and treating them with kindness and compassion.
So I had to slow down, be present to the genuine sharing in front of me, to the person in front of me. I’m not proud that I had to slow down to do this, that I had to put effort into it, it’s no fun to see that it’s me that’s seeing people just as their roles instead of as equals, but it’s the truth about myself, and I’m learning it.
I remember when I was first interested in looking at my privilege as a white person. I had a friend who was a housekeeper. She was African American, and I asked her something (I don't recall how I approached the subject). What I do recall was the one line she said. "My taking care of folks is a choice, and I like it, being taken care of doesn't make you an asshole, being an asshole makes you an asshole." She was doing something she enjoyed for work (which is more than I can say for myself at the time) and paying her bills. But most importantly she reminded me that how I respond to my privilege or someone's service is what matters, not if I am being served.
ReplyDeleteI also learned about this by practice. A very good teacher once reminded me that part of the responsibility of being a monk (or a bodhisattva) is to provide the opportunity for others to do good things (earn merit, earn good karma or however you want to say it...). If I keep trying to do everything for myself, I deprive people of the chance to make offerings and serve others. You don't have to be a monk for this to be true.
Glad you are having an awesome Time! Can't wait to hear more about it in person.