How to French

“Are you done with your phone?”

It was the first thing the waiter at a casual deli said to me as I had sat down for breakfast. It caught me off guard.

My location was at a cliff side touristic town in the South of France, overlooking the beautiful blue sea on a hot sunny day. 

Whereas I had woken up feeling full of energy and excited to explore, connect and relax for the day ahead, my mood had shifted after hearing those six words from a stranger. 

“Are you done with your phone?”

I started to notice my energy drop. My excitement fade. I became more self conscious and felt less comfortable. Perhaps even a little less safe, emotionally. 

Then the person I was with reflected back to me how quickly my energy shifted and checked in with me. 

That helped me snap out of it. Almost instantly.

I began to wonder how such an innocent, harmless, irrelevant question could impact me so easily. As someone who likes to feel in control, that moment made me realize how little control I actually have. I didn’t like it. 

Instead of passing a judgment that the waiter was rude, or drawing on a stereotype about the French, I instead started to become curious about why the waiter acted in a certain way. 

Realizing pretty quickly that I didn’t have enough context or information about the waiter to build a story that would justify in my mind his action, I had to be satisfied with the only thing I could come up with. “There must be a reason that has absolutely nothing to do with me”. 

Maybe he woke up on the wrong side of the bed that morning. Maybe he had some difficult circumstances he was working through in his home life. Maybe he was raised or conditioned to believe that it was normal to act this way. 

The point is that I don’t know exactly why, and don’t need to, but know that there is a reason. And that reason likely has nothing to do with me. 

I had been taking the interaction personally when in fact it wasn’t. 

One of my spiritual teachers, Anthony De Mello, says in his writings, “what others think of you says more about them then it does about you”. 

While I have read this line many times, and understood this intellectually, this experience helped me feel it. 

I am not as important as I think I am. And definitely not as important to other people who are not in my daily life. The problem becomes when I conflate the world with my world. When my perspective of the world becomes so small, so tiny actually, that everything becomes about me and my experience of the world. 

In reflecting on this out loud over breakfast, my energy shifted and I began to feel compassion for the waiter. I went from feeling agitation to feeling compassion, without anything or anyone outside of me having to change one bit. 

Compassion requires me to see something from multiple perspectives. Not only the perspective that is convenient to me.  Not only the perspective that is beneficial to me. Not only the perspective that is aligned with my values and beliefs. 

When I stop at simply passing judgment that “that is good”, “this is bad” or “I don’t like this”, then I am being intellectually lazy. Instead of passing judgment and moving on, if instead I pause for a moment and become curious to understand the why behind the action that I may like or dislike, my initial judgment turns into compassion for the person or circumstance in question. 

Understanding is more important than agreement. 

Conflict occurs, be it in the world, my world or in my mind, trying to get to agreement. However it is unlikely that I will ever agree with everything and everyone I come across. And every time I disagree with something, it is a form of conflict. Be it expressed or repressed, there is still some friction I am experiencing energetically with my environment. And over a lifetime of friction with my environment, the toll adds up. 

However, understanding is something that is in my control. It is on me to choose to be curious and open to understanding this thing or person in my current environment or experience of life that I may not agree with.

With this newfound appreciation that behind every action or choice I witness or experience, there is a reason behind it. I feel an ease and calm, and can glide through life with a bit more grace and a bit less friction. 

And that is how I learned to glide.