I was walking down the hall at the office. A
person new to the department was walking toward me. As I passed her, I nodded
and smiled and uttered the usual throwaway line. “How are you doing?” (The
variation is, “How’s it going?”)
You don’t expect an answer. You’re being
polite. But you’re not committing yourself to anything more than hearing a
“Fine” in return. You have work to do, meetings to attend, people to talk to,
all of the general busy-ness of contemporary work life.
“Do you really want to know?” she replied in an
almost anguished voice.
She knew the politeness-in-the-hallway code.
And something had prompted her to step out of it.
I stopped, and said what I didn’t really mean.
“Yes. Are you okay?”
For the next 30 minutes (we moved to her
office), a story poured out that seemed more like fiction than reality.
She came from a well-known and socially
prominent local family. Her parents were always somewhere else, traveling. Her
brother was in parts unknown. She was caring for an elderly aunt who alternated
between lucidity and dementia, often in seconds. The aunt was terrified that
someone would get control of her estate and have her committed to an
institution, and for a very good reason: she herself had made a career out of
doing exactly that – getting control of elderly people’s estates and then
having them committed. To add to the mix, my new work colleague was being
stalked by a distant relative, who himself was trying to get control of her
aunt’s estate.
And all I had asked was how she was doing.
We became friends, and she became friends with
my wife as well. We talked. We shared outside-of-work writing projects. We’d
have dinner. It was only after we moved to a new town that our friendship
gradually lessened. But our lives, and my life, was immeasurably enriched by
that simple exchange in a workplace hallway.
None of us wore masks. My friend was feeling
desperate. I decided to listen.
In The Cure: What if
God Isn’t Who You Think He Is and Neither Are You, authors John Lynch, Bruce McNichol and Bill Thrall cite
three categories mask-wearers fall into.
Those who try to convince others they’re doing
“just fine.”
Those who are still searching for the next new
technique to solve their issues and problems (and are the target audience of
the self-help book publishing industry).
And those who wear the “pedigreed” masks – the
postcard-perfect people who have everything together, no problems, no messy
stuff in their lives.
The normal answer my work colleague should have
made was “I’m fine, thank you” and walked on. But she didn’t. Her response
caught me off-guard. I could have immediately donned a mask, probably the
pedigreed mask. I could have listened politely and moved on.
But I didn’t. I could hear the desperation and
even fear in her voice. So I listened.
And it changed my life.
Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve
been reading The Cure. To see more posts on this chapter, “Two Faces,” please
visit Jason at Connecting to Impact.
