Learning to act right (36)… When we need someone to do it for us!!

Torrey Orton

July 28, 2013

“He’ll have the bubbly red, too”

 

The other day I was out for a lunch bite with Mike. When he’s lunching at the University Café he takes a glass of bubbly red with it. I seldom drink midday, midweek unless on the road as in the Brasserie du Commerce in Besancon two months ago. This time, however, I was free after lunch so I started contemplating a glass myself and got hung up between a house shiraz and the aforesaid bubbly red, which I did not know other than by the repute his use of it lent. The waiter was standing there and I was uhming and awing.

 

My decision was all that stood between us and lunch starting its trip from the kitchen and I couldn’t make it. I was stuck in the roundabout of indeterminable differences between the options, pedalling and still.

 

“He’ll have the bubbly red, too”…

 

… Mike said and I settled in relief, as did the waiter. A classic of the situation where any decision is OK, if someone would just make one. I so much needed help at the moment that I didn’t know it until he provided it decisively. Either would be good for me if I could make the move. Thanks to Mike I was moved. It was an ethically vacuous event, but clear in its agency. I submitted to the push of his action, and needed to do so if the rest of the event was to unfold.

 

It occurred to me at the time that this was also a major purpose of close relationships – to share the decision load of life as much as the consequential work. And sharing is sometimes to pick up the bundle unasked…which requires a slightly daring arrogation of rights to oneself in the interest of preserving the participation of the other in the shared load!!!

 

There are two things in joint decision making (which seldom means both coming to the same conclusion simultaneously). It must be right in content and in process: we have to come to decisions in acceptable ways - consultatively, considerately, flexibly…and, we have to make the right decision for the task in question. The process is more important than the product since specific decisions can often be changed modified, adapted (usually do if they are substantive ones) and that requires effective consultation. These are mostly engineering problems, problems of having right tools and flexible application rules. The decision, however, is pure art - intuitive, scatty, quick – in need of a spark and failing the internal one, an outer will do fine. Someone has to move, and a hand is sometimes required.

 

Let’s run that by again in story form

 

Two months ago now I had been stuck in a decision muddle for weeks about taking a week to go to the US for a family reunion, or not to. I really was stuck in thinking which was dangling in the branches of multiple considerations of sentiment and logistics until I visited a now dead friend, Barry, who was clearly on the way to dying in his own mind at the time. I stopped by the palliative care place he had recently been consigned to and shared my small concern. “Do it”, he said almost before I got my considerations shaped up for him. His own brother, long separated, somewhat estranged, had just been down from another state to see him and they had talked for the first time in years. He was clear about the relationship priorities of late life. I could feel my mind slip over a cog as he spoke and walked out with uncluttered resolve to go (which I will be doing in two weeks).

 

 

Travel funnies 2013 (5)

Travel funnies 2013 (5)
Torrey Orton
July 3, 2013

A few late entries…a wind in Budapest

Each night a wind rushed by our hotel window, with unpredictable patterns, though greater intensity and frequency when the temperature dropped on our third of four days in town. It actually was a bus of pre-Liberation (‘90’s variety liberation) vintage which compete with trams of requisite modernity for the carriage of Budapesters about town. The thing about pre-Liberation is that it was pre-customer service and quality in vehicle production pretty much everywhere in the fading remnants of the communist world. So, a Budabus (product of the now defunct Trabant factory in the old GDR??) is likely to have a suspension which specialises in direct translation of all movement effects to passengers, both viscerally and audibly. Those passing our window (which we also used personally a couple of times) mostly seemed to exhibit these criteria, aggravated by the fact that the streets outside our window were paved with 4 X 4 inch cobblestones of significant antiquity and modest residual grouting.

The effect of their passing was to produce a wind-like noise which came out of nowhere and disappeared as quickly, much like a winter wind in a mild storm pushing against hard surfaces (houses and bare trees usually). On the last night I actually thought it was a wind which at times in fact it was - an aftereffect of the temperature dropping weather front descending on Budapest from the northwest in the afternoon before. The balance of the impressions was exactly the kind of perceptual fuzziness that leads to really serious misimpressions – like, a bus and a breeze hit you with disturbingly different effects.

And grandiose makes a late reappearance…

Dubai is a regular passing thru point for us, and occasional stopover, of which this was one. Passing through almost annually over the last ten years has made the persistent growth of the Emirates Airline hub unavoidably present to view.

I’ve not been to all the deserts in the world but I’ve learned some serious pleasures of seeing and being from venturing out into parts of the biggest one in the world which is

Australia, perhaps; certainly united under one flag.

The Dubai version of desert gives the whole genre a bad name, mixed with pretences to orderly modern living which are irritated by continuous efforts to reclaim land by dredging from the Gulf on the way to the next property crash after the recovery from the last one a few years ago is worked through. There is almost nothing naturally great or grand about it. They make up (is that what’s happening consciously??) for this by grandiosities of construction. The Burj Khalifa may come to mind, being clearly the biggest manmade thing pricking the heavens with no other intent (as communication towers have) than to prickle.

This time I’m thinking of their latest airport wonder which wows with its extreme approach. What most glares is the sunlight in the huge four story open spaces which are the entry halls, ticketing desks (well run, by the way), and more sales sites than your average mall. All air conditioned. That’s the bit which suddenly got me – the grandiose bit is showing off that electricity is a meaningless concern there by building hothouses which require it without growing anything but passenger through put. Without aircon, the throughput would wilt as the internal temp rose to the 50’sC.

The buildings are, of course, modern ugly with lots of glistening polished metal sheathing of everything standing over polished stone floors. It is after all just a hothouse masquerading as a country mall in a temperate climate. Remember, 40C-plus all day every day (with a drop to 28C at night) is Dubai’s fate 10 months a year approx… so hot that outdoor work like construction stops from about 11:00am to 3pm and workers do beach cricket in open lots (there was a five hectare one opposite our window, which probably was actually a manmade ‘beach’ like much of the waterfront of Dubai) from 6am to 7am.

Desert skating rink!?

One last thing: the Dubai Hyatt’s in house mall had an ice skating rink in it with figure skates for rent and easy availability …which gave me a serious pause, thinking how long has it been since I’ve been on skates (30 years approximately since I used my last pair on a small lake in Beijing in 1983!)? Yes, I was already thinking it, tempted by the double achievement of just skating again with that desert rink add-on. And, no, I did not take it up because they only had figure skates and I’ve never skated in them and I could already see myself stumbling forward on my nose as their toe teeth caught in the ice and I’d look like a beginner and probably break something too. So, I didn’t though I knew my skating skills would all be there (I’d done an inline roller skating run 20 years ago) and those skills would be what almost insured my falling to the toe teeth.