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Thursday, December 31, 2020 - daily column # 6623
Some people don’t experience passable interactions …
How often do we have a chance to interact with vs. ignore; pedestrians on street corners we wait for before turning, anyone we open a door for, or someone who holds a door open for us, someone at the counter we pay for gas or gum or coffee? Or someone we could have given a thank-you wave, or someone in the next lane we let in, or who let us in?
Add multitudinous calls, texts, emails, and snail-mail daily. So many opportunities. How many do we let go by unnoticed, not acted upon? Imagine if you had the tally – for all of 2020, the math for those occasions where you spent a ½ second to wave, or smile, or nod, or say thank you – would you have taken even 5% of those opportunities while leaving 95% of them to sail right by?
My guess is that most of us miss 95% of those opportunities. I’m not suggesting we are blind and can’t see them, but we miss them in terms of opportunity for interaction – a scotoma of sorts when we see them yet don’t see them (i.e., the basketball awareness test).
Still, we all have so many brief encounters that we passively ignore, not realizing opportunities for improved connections we have many chances for every day.
I’m not formalizing a New Year’s resolution here, but I’m going to turn this around in 2020. I might find it wearying, or that I can’t make those moments, but I won’t know until I make that effort.
I expect and hope those ½ second pauses make life better.
Reader feedback:
Mark, you just need a round TUIT!, SB, Calgary, AB
Hope your “clean slate’ day is going well. Makes you stop go … hmmm, CM, Langley, BC
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