If you sit downtown at an open-air pub downtown (like the one I’m at now), something interesting happens.
First — I can only assume — you are an appealing possibility to anyone who is on the street asking for food or cash. The reason I stopped at this pub to work was because I passed a guitarist with a harmonica standing on the sidewalk and singing for donations, guitar case open, his music mojo simply rockin’. He put a smile on my face, and I dug money out of my wallet. And I went into the pub next door, because I wanted to keep listening.
Second… you start really thinking about it, because you know it’s going to happen again. Once I sat down next to the open doors — it’s like a little balcony with a railing — a man in a wheelchair paused just outside on the sidewalk to ask me to help him get something to eat. So I bought him a burger. And another man asked me for money about an hour later — but at that point I was tapped out and had to wish him luck. These experiences are still fascinating to me, not on a scientific level, but on some kind of visceral level. Something else is going on during these exchanges.
Pinning down that something has occupied a lot of brain power for me in the last few years. And sitting downtown to work right out in the open is an excellent way to expose myself to this interaction more frequently, and give me more of an opportunity to figure out what the hell is going on. It’s something human, something pervasive, something universal… and I think it’s about a gut-level hospitality that we don’t talk about quite as often as we should.
It’s not simply that there are people on the street who need that help — or who make a living by asking others for assistance. I don’t think I have much of an opinion about that, except that when someone asks me for help in a way that feels genuine to me, I generally say yes — especially if I can say yes with food. There is a healthy positive energy and connection and emotional openness in saying yes. Usually, saying yes takes nothing from me. It’s five bucks, or a meal I could just as easily have bought for myself or a friend.
There’s a whole debate about saying yes, of course. Entrepreneurs whose time is more and more in demand must learn to say no in order to focus on the things that they do best. And there’s an enormous conversation about whether to help or ignore people on the street. Do you meet their eyes and respond? Do you look away and walk more quickly?
But this is different. This is more basic and human. This is a fundamental kind of hospitality to the universe that maybe mirrors cultural hospitality that I’ve heard of in the past, traditions with guidelines for inviting travelers — strangers! — into your house and feeding them and giving them a comfortable place to sleep. Now that we’re all isolated, now that we lock our doors and want lots of space and hear scary stories on the news, you don’t hear about those traditions so much anymore.
But making a connection with someone living a completely different life from me in that little way, being asked, and saying yes, that is somehow really amazing. It’s such an amazing little exchange that I feel like it’s long past the discussion of whether it’s appropriate to encourage panhandling, or whether the person should (or can) be looking for a job, or whether the money is safer going to institutions that help homeless people, or whether the person you’re interacting with might be taking the money you give them to go spend on alcohol or illegal substances and so on and so forth.
And sure, I care. Of course I care. I’m not crazy about the idea of giving someone money to fuck themselves up.
But this isn’t ABOUT THAT.
This is about two people looking each other in the eye. And one of them asks. And one of them answers.
And because both are human and both have a pre-existing cosmic link — me and them, you and I, all of us — when the one asks, the second says yes if the second can say yes.
It’s the same thing I feel when a client with dwindling resources and a panicked note in his voice asks me for help figuring out how he can make money the way he wants, instead of the way he’s supposed to (at the job that’s killing him). It’s the feeling that I can help, and that I want to. That if I funnel as much mental juice as I can into that one phone call, I might make the difference they need, and that it’s far more worth it for exactly that reason. The way I do it outside of consulting, as often as I can do it, is by saying yes.
It matters so much — regardless of who, or what mistakes there were, or anything else — because we’re together in this thing. We’re together in this thing even if the person who asks is on the street living a life I can barely comprehend, and ten minutes ago I was whingeing about having an income gap in March, and having to temporarily figure out how to make rent in my very decent apartment with all my cool electronic toys and pastimes and ways to make myself a living doing whatever the hell I want.
I’m not saying you should always say yes. But saying yes is an acknowledgment of our sameness, despite differences, a way of offering hospitality of whatever kind because it’s the right thing to do. Remember who you are. You’re certainly not as isolated as it seems.
If any of us are ever going to say no, it should damn well be for the right reasons.
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