In the Hippie School class last week, for a few days we talked about Personal Performance in Everyday Life, or something like that, which mostly means considering your dress and facial expressions and small interactions with people all the time, public and communal and private, and how these things are all part of how you express your intentions. Like, if you have a self-stated intention of encouraging people to make art, or wanting everyone to be joyful, or wanting to fix poverty, how are the elements you put together and call your Self working toward that? I haven't thought about this before: a lot of the interactions I have, I tell myself I'm doing the best I can, where mostly I try to be kind and friendly but feel shy and don't know what to say beyond surface greetings. That was my main critique of the discussion and the method: that it doesn't allow for shyness. And that is a thing that interested me. It doesn't allow for an explanation of shyness in our behavior -- and so what? If the way you're making yourself isn't leading to the outcome you have said you want, why not try something else? Maybe it'll sound obvious, but Just Try Not Being Shy is not a thing that occurs to me usually. It seems unfair to say to anyone, given the way we usually explain our personalities, but... well? But. I continue.

And then we had ten minutes to write some notes about ourselves: what we wear, how we answer the phone, how we think we talk. And to go backward, to look at the intentions a person might assume we are acting on, based on those views of us. And what I came up with -- now this is not entirely new to me but I don't like to think it explicitly because it makes me sad -- is that most of my actions are tailored to stay out of people's way, and to not force them to change their own intentions. I tend to agree with people in conversations, or to find some way for the talk to come around to mutual pleasantness. If I pass somebody on the sidewalk, I try to catch their eye to say hello, but if they don't look back I don't just yell hello at them; they might be busy and what, I'm gonna intrude on their life like a jerk?

And I got to thinking, maybe that mindset I have sucks. Maybe-definitely. Some people, notably some people I like and want to be friends with, literally like to be argued with. They look for it. They say what is the point of existing in society if you're not going to engage with people in ways that might feel uncomfortable? They say how do you ever make something new if you don't break something that exists?

All of which is not to advocate spending time with people you hate and who hate you, or scraping your knees just to see them heal, but... it's something there, I think. I go around hoping things will be blandly pleasant, that we'll all feel great about the way things are going, that I won't ever have to cry, and then I still do because I don't talk to anyone and I know that's not what life is for. And I should remember that growing and making and remaking is difficult and ugly and also necessary.