Uncommon courtesy

“Howdy neighbor. How ya doin’ this fine and dandy mornin’?” (Here goes nothing for my best Southern accent attempt, lol)

I remember the day a silly little daydream flashed across my mind. Overlooking the morning rush hour in my city, I mused that every person in every car was my friend. I continued to wonder how I would manage to greet each one as they drove past: Would I keep lifting my hand to wave, or should I nod my acknowledgment, or would I adopt the continuous Royal Wave? Ha! I chuckled. Knowing how my waves tend to carry the highly charged energies of excitement and giddiness I feel when I see a kindred friendly soul, I concluded I would be a traffic hazard clown.

In the past, I’ve felt self-conscious and needy concerning my whimsical dream. One day, however, I challenged myself to pursue it because my soul was discontent with how terribly disconnected or rude I felt our species was becoming. I began with the least of society, and behold, like a magical spell, I discovered that greeting is the ultimate little simple act we can all do anytime, anywhere to activate and extend peace in our inner and outer worlds.

I grew up in a culture where greeting was not a question but a prized courtesy that we enacted without hesitation upon seeing another person. Minors were expected to pay honor where it was due, and any adult was at liberty to swat at an impudent youth who dared pass without offering a reverent greeting. When my Mama explained why we greet, and the little solid meanings behind the hand gestures involved in greeting, my heart swelled at the splendor of this humble ceremony.

The simple act of greeting is a courteous expression of recognition, welcome, and goodwill that varies uniquely with cultures, proximity, contexts, and familiarity. What seems to have become universal symbols are a wave of the hand, a slight acknowledging nod, and the handshake – the latter, now recognized as a filthy practice due to its rapid spreading of germs and viruses, has been replaced by elbow bumps. Most cultures adhere to greeting more senior persons before others.

Why should we need to greet?

A smile and a wave melt hostility instantly. Even the most stoic being has no defense against these biological weapons each of us possesses and may use at will. When I started my greeting revolution, I lived in a “dangerous” part of the city. Being female, I felt exposed in this ravenous bandit-swamped hood. Passing through this place was a daily risk. Pickpockets, murderers, drug dealers, pimps, and rapists were all camouflaged in the hustle and bustle of the city. Stragglers littered the streets harassing every female with catcalls, jeers, and threats.  Thus to implement my campaign, I needed to craft it just right.

Too much friendliness invited the unwanted company as I trotted to the next taxi rank. Too little sparked aggressive growls and biting insults. My experiment aimed to prove that even “such as these” longed for recognition, welcome, and good wishes, expressed in the humble act of greeting.

Method 1: Guns blazing. The apparatus: Smile and Wave

My natural inclinations tend to be excess. I feel too much. I think too much. I love too hard. I smile too brightly. I hug too tight. I wave too frantically. For the malnourished vultures, such overflows after eternal droughts roused curiosity, then startling vampiric consumption of my simple regard. In a flash, this strategy backfired. No sooner had they tasted love that the rooks sought to claim me as territory, and take possession of me.

It remains a marvel of the Invisible Hand’s protection that I was unharmed in a place where many a female has suffered unspeakable violations.

Still, I desired to let the wolves know I saw the lambs beneath so I deployed Method 2: Word Power

Now, acutely aware of the extent of the wolves’ famine and their uncontrollable impulses, I went in composed and with a clear purpose. I was determined to compact the message my smile, wave, and eyes transmitted and make the intention and boundaries of my greeting clear. How did I do that, you ask? I got an insight to test the notion of the power of the mind for telepathy. So, for a time, I looped an affirmation in my mind and envisioned the words traveling in waves through the city and alighting on the souls who languished for the sustenance that acknowledgment and recognition inject.

“I see you, the divine image of the Most High. Greetings and goodwill, I extend to you” I silently chanted.

This method was greatly successful. It confirmed that indeed words are real creative forces that travel to whosoever and whatsoever we direct them. At first, those I greeted appeared roused from absentia, bewildered. Others were amazed, even astonished. Then some seemed to bloom in ultimate recognition.

The act of greeting increases our sense of others. When we see and acknowledge others, we are saying to them: “I see you and your whole life, whatever it may look like, matters.”

We tend to avoid greeting the poor, the beggar, the stranger, and shockingly these days people in the same houses and offices neglect to extend honor to one another. Oftentimes people double-take or even stop and stare when I greet them. I guess one way or another we are both puzzled. I wonder why it has become such a foreign thing when once upon a time it was common sense. Needless to say, our now tech-advanced lifestyles are not helping, or rather we are misusing technological tools to our own demise.

During my experiment, I observed how the intention to greet other beings around you can reduce the chances of being mugged or attacked. I witnessed how in great efforts to dodge acknowledging another, many people walk looking downward or blankly forward. Nowadays, most people lock their eyes and give their ears to mobile devices, yet pay no attention to the divinity all around them, and this mindlessness puts their own lives at great risk. Consider the insolence of this scene you and I have played the leading role: you walk past a beggar with your head buried in your phone. You may briefly glance up just so you don’t walk smack straight into the person approaching but just a fleeting dismissive glance and back to a fixation on your screen. Crazy, ain’t it? This chosen posture to ignore what and who is about us makes many practitioners ripe pickings for mugging and attack.

Failing to greet is a silent declaration made to another that shouts the message: you are nothing of worth or value. Frankly, no one likes being spoken to this way, verbally or not. Thus this really nasty stinking attitude and dead conscience action results in hostility from the dismissed marvel that is a whole human being.

If only our rudeness remained confined to paupers and strangers, but alas, we do this in marriages too!

I noticed degeneration in myself when my husband came home and I fleetingly glanced up and then back to my screen. This screen came with me to the dinner table, in bed, and interrupted while he tried to have an important conversation. The glittering screen was more attractive, more awesome. Take a moment to imagine the magnitude of these insults we hurl at everyone, everywhere! We lack understanding and wisdom and will perish in our carelessness and blind ignorance.

Blind ignorance is a state where we think we know it all, when in fact we do not know the simplest things we ought to do to survive in life. We waste so much money on insurance and armed responses because we are just too dull to comprehend how life in communities works. Everyone is important in a community. Not only because they are part of our little clique but for the mere wonder and majesty that is each breathing life.

So much is embodied in our neighbor that it is sacrilege to dismiss anyone, as though they are a fly – though sometimes in our corruption, even these get more attention than a human. We all know we are so valuable but the act of imagining that only we are valuable is a great error we are making whose consequences we have already suffered and will suffer evermore.

When we stop valuing human beings and human life, only desolation follows. These days we are more lonely and depressed – needlessly so since at any given moment, there is an eternal being at hand to enjoy conversation and closeness with, irrespective of the appearance of their physical tent. Divine communion illuminates the darkness of our minds, enabling us to see that we are not alone but have an endless supply of our kind with whom to walk the path of life.

Despising to greet others all around us ruins our bodies as well. It takes so much effort to evade someone, more than we know. The obvious effect of this really daft exercise is hunched postures – due to looking down most of the time. I imagine gravity also pulls down on a downward countenance causing faster sagging as the facial muscles are not actively engaging with the world they should be cheerfully facing (my humble working theory).

With each dismissal of the divine, our souls die a little each day. Why should others consider us important (something we all inherently demand) when we mindlessly discard others who are just like us? When we do this, we are in effect telling ourselves that a human (you and me) doesn’t matter. Soon after we develop feelings of disharmony as we try to reaffirm our worth in selfies and God knows what else. We can’t despise our kind on this very basic level and expect our lives to flourish.

So why don’t we greet anymore?

As I said, I grew up in a place where greeting was enforced as a foundational value from infancy. In this age of tattered, demented, and abominable family structures, feral progeny knows nothing of basic courtesies and etiquette. It’s a jungle out there.

Up and down, back and forth, we roam. With places to go, people to see, and always in a rush to get somewhere or do something, we make no room for spontaneous conversation that may strike up with god on the bus, train, taxi, Uber, or check-out queues.

Seized by dreams and nightmares, we easily get lost in our own heads and lives, after all, it’s the closest to a sure thing we’ve got and we want to hold on and never let go. Nevertheless, everything and everyone is not by chance and may very well be a key set piece you need for perhaps a clue to the next step in your dream, or a rope to reel you out of drowning in nightmarish life sagas (another working theory).

Excuses aside, perhaps we don’t greet because we are just pure evil.

Sure we love to think of ourselves as good. But we are not. We are inherently selfish pathetic creatures and when we do not engage with life to evolve into mature useful members of our species, we simply decline further into our basest nature. This is to say we become ever increasingly selfish, self-absorbed, and self-centered all the while using up and enjoying the resources that should be enjoyed by a collective symbiotic species – each one giving and taking of Love’s providence, proportionately.

At some point, however, the selfish cannot be allowed to continue in his ways, and as such a time of reckoning soon comes to the one, and the nation that perpetuates base infantile attitudes. That said, let not my banter by no means imply that I am discarding the fact that some people are too far gone and not the warmest embrace can turn them from wickedness. In addition, I am wary that cunning criminal minds may capture this thought and tweak it for their ill gains.

Nonetheless, we need to return to the urgent business of serving uncommon courtesy to our neighbors and make it once more the rule.

Our placing value on a person no matter their station, that little act of kindness can raise a life, and that life may very well be our own for we will feel good – more human– as we rescind contempt and receive life’s reciprocal gifts of dignity, peace, wonder, righteousness, and joy.

xoxo

Nimi