Softening the Edges

A humbling reminder about the stories we invent about others

One of the things I think about a lot when it comes to shared living is this. Many of us have been living alone for years, if not decades.

When you live alone that long, you get used to controlling your environment. The temperature. The music. The dishes in the sink. The rhythm of the day. You answer to no one.

Shared living asks something different of us.

It asks us to soften around the edges.

At this Big Age, most of us also carry something else. A lot of certainty. We have lived long enough to feel like we can read situations pretty well. We observe something, draw a conclusion, and feel fairly confident we are right.

But there is a small mental move we all make that can get us into trouble, especially when we are living with other people.

We see a behavior, decide what that behavior means, and then react to the meaning we just invented.

A friend of mine has a phrase she uses whenever someone is upset about something another person did. She listens for a minute and then asks a simple question.

“What did you make that mean?”

It is a brilliant question because it inserts a pause into that fast little mental leap. It reminds us that we did not just observe something. We interpreted it.

And interpretations can be wrong.

Let me give you a humbling example that happened to me at the gym recently.

I am in my early seventies and something of a gym bunny these days, working out four or five times a week and exercising at home in between.

There is a woman I see at the gym pretty regularly.

She is younger than me by maybe twenty five or thirty years.

Over the months I would occasionally glance over at her on the elliptical.

She is barely moving, slow as molasses.

Sometimes she stops altogether, pausing and stretching.

From what I observed, it did not look like much effort.

Meanwhile I’m zipping along on my elliptical machine.

And yes, somewhere along the way I started telling myself a little story about her. That she was not pushing herself very hard.

Then one day I happened to land on the elliptical right beside hers.

At one point I glanced over at her screen.

My mouth hit the floor.

Her resistance level was fifteen times mine.

15.

And she had already burned over 600 calories.

At her machine setting, I am not even sure I could get the pedals to move.

And there I was, happily chugging along, quietly wondering why she did not seem to be trying very hard.

It was a good reminder of how quickly the mind fills in the blanks.

In a shared living situation, moments like that are going to happen all the time.

Someone leaves a dish in the sink.

Someone closes the door a little harder than usual.

Someone seems quiet at dinner.

We see the behavior. We decide what it means. And before long we are reacting to a story we wrote ourselves.

One of the small disciplines of living well with other people might simply be this: pause long enough to ask the question.

What did I make that mean?

Because too often the story we’re reacting to is not what’s actually happening at all.