Experiencing the Holidays
My youngest son, Thomas, gave us two experiential gifts this year. One of the bright people at Airbnb came up with a revenue filler called Airbnb Experiences and he and his significant other, Jenna, thought it would be a good gift for us. One was the about learning to be Polish, done by a lovely woman from Krakow who is an underemployed tour guide. The other, which we did last night, was a sing-along with a Broadway star. I’ve already described the Polish experience, which I felt was a nice substitute for or preparation for travel to Krakow. Let’s face it, nobody needs to understand what travel to Poland is all about, so its value was less about the information conveyed and more about the spirit of the experience and the idea of connecting with someone you might otherwise never meet. There are 7.8 billion people on this earth, 5 billion of whom are adults. If you live to the age of 85 you will have been alive for about 45 million minutes, so even if you were the most gregarious person in the world you could at most probably superficially meet (meaning, say, make eye contact with if not give a greeting) 1% of the world’s adult population. If you believe that everyone has value and that there is probably something you can learn from or enjoy with everyone, you should try to broaden your acquaintances as much as you can. Many people find this to be too much trouble. Let’s face it, it is a lot easier to get done the things we seek to do if we are far more restrictive with whom we choose to associate. Limiting our coterie of friends, while restrictive, is more the norm in modern life even though there is a definite range of how people go about this triage process.
In college I had a wide array of friends on my freshman floor, a group of people who shared a certain range of intellect, were all more or less of the same age, were mostly American, but were otherwise quite different. There were pre-professionals (pre-med and pre-law) that felt college was a stepping stone to a better life of prosperity. There were science and engineering types who wanted mostly to advance their specific skills to explore the world around them in all sorts of directions. There were artistic and humanities types that wanted to wallow in their art or knowledge base. There were social activists that were concerned about making the world a better place. And there were a certain number of us who just wanted to explore what life had to offer and felt that a college setting was the best place to accomplish that. Some people were naturally loners and stayed more to themselves. Some people were outgoing and were always the social butterflies that wanted to taste the pollen from the broadest selection of people. By the end of Freshman Year we all had to decide something about our direction since choosing where to live became the embodiment of one of our first important life decisions. It was less about where the bed was located than who the people would be that would be surrounding you in that selection.
We all understand that in life there are proactive choices and there are default decisions. If you do not actively make a choice, you are forced towards or at least gravitate towards the default choice where the bulge in the normal distribution curve of life find themselves. For our particular dorm floor, the default decision was the scrappy Fraternity that took seventeen of us in one fell swoop. Good for them (they needed new blood) and good for us, because it postponed an active decision in favor of a perfectly good and cognitively agreeable default. There were some on our floor who had interests which drove them logically in other directions, like the jock fraternity or the hippie commune co-ed house. Still others preferred to stay in the limited dormitory system and presumably get a new batch of floor buddies. The more independent-minded went early in the direction of off-campus housing where most of us knew we would eventually end up, but were not so anxious to push for that route for Sophomore year. Sophomore year was our first real choice of how broad we would allow ourselves to venture in the social world of the university. One of my first-year favorites, who lived across the hall, was Michael. He is a wonderfully funny guy who is always quick to laugh and make fun of any and every situation or person in the most non-offensive manner you can imagine. Michael always had a broader coterie of friends than most of the others on the floor including me. It is who he is. He joined the most social fraternity on campus and reassured the rest of us that he was not abandoning us, but would see us all often.
That is exactly what happened. He and I shared interests in golf and skiing so we stayed connected loosely through college. Then after college, he drifted in and out of our coterie, but was just as likely to gather with us for a party as he was to gather with his other friends from his fraternity or elsewhere. Michael is one of those people who make you feel like you’ve seen each other every day even when its been six months. He just has that engaging and happy-go-lucky manner that makes you feel like you are right where you left off.
Since we are not all as naturally and broadly connected as Michael, and since we have all pulled in our horns somewhat during the past year of tangling with COVID, I think its important that we all try a little harder be more outgoing and engaging. A painless and easy way to practice is through gatherings like these Airbnb Experiences. For the cost of a movie for two (even without popcorn) you can have one of these experiences and find yourself engaging with people you don’t know and with whom you have no axes to grind. You want nothing from them and they want nothing from you. That is especially so for other participants versus the experience host who is taking responsibility for the gathering. You have to learn to balance talking and listening just like you did in kindergarten, but other than that, its all pretty casual. All you know about one another going in is that you are somewhat interested in whatever topic you are planning to experience.
Our second experience was particularly interesting, not only because Kim is a singer and much of our social life in New York was about singing (cabaret, theater, singing organizations in which Kim is involved), but because singing is, by its nature, a more “put-it-all-out-there” activity than, say listening to a lecture on some esoteric topic. The inhibition barriers must come down and that opens us to enjoy the company and the repartee with others. So, here we are, stuck in a global pandemic, not having the ability to travel, but now finding new means to connect with people we didn’t heretofore know. We all share many commonalities. Some are shared interests, some are shared desire to interact, and all of us, if we let ourselves, share a common humanity which can’t help but come out when we let it. So, go out and experience the holidays even if you just stay on your couch and in front of your favorite screen. Thank you, Thomas and Jenna.