Bermuda Bench (Good Morning Bermuda, Part 2)
I wrote last week about talking to people who passed a bench at my hotel in Bermuda. Sometimes people arrived in groups and, without addressing me directly, revealed things about themselves. I didn't eavesdrop, since I was sitting right next to them, but I did listen in and occasionally join in with a friendly word. I listened to people talk about their lives and their vacation and express impatience, hope, annoyance, hunger, thirst, pleasure- all the things one might expect from listening to strangers talk among themselves. I was particularly taken with the conversation of a group of young women who had come from the beach.
They were obviously college students who were in Bermuda for a summer vacation in the sun. They spoke of their teachers, their friends, their families, their dinner plans, their life plans. There was nothing remarkable in their conversation. I've heard young people talk about the same things since I was young. In fact, the most interesting thing might have been how much their conversation resembled conversations of similar groups forty or fifty years ago. Although the world is more complicated now and these young women have concerns we didn't have as young people, when I mentally compared them to young women I knew many years ago, I was struck by how much more alike than different they were.
More alike than different. That's a theme I continually think about. Differences among races, among cultures, among age groups. We're all more alike than different. If we could all recognize that, we'd all get along better. We need to listen to people who are superficially different and try to learn from their experiences. Then our lives would be better.
Sometimes I think about being young again. Would I repeat the same mistakes? Would I listen to an older person trying to give me the benefit of his or her experience? Then I think what would happen if I could be young with the same experience I have today. I believe I would make fewer mistakes, make better decisions. I presumably would listen to my more experienced self in a way that I didn't listen to older people when I was young. Why do young people insist on making avoidable mistakes, why do they avoid listening to voices of experience?
And then I think it's a broader problem. It's not just that the young don't listen to the old. We resist listening to people who appear different, thinking they have nothing to say to us. If we all listened to people whose lives, whose experiences are different from ours, we'd avoid some mistakes, we'd make more good decisions, we'd be better off. And most importantly, the people we listen to would be better off.
8-25-03
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