What does it mean to be nice?
A brief journal entry after my final dinner on a trip to Paris.
I have 12 hours left of a four week junket through a few European countries and this question has been my one major learning through out it.
This trip is but a drop in the ocean in terms of what it means to my life. I’ll forget a lot of it and at times I’ve hardly felt present. Almost as if I’m just spacing out like watching a bad John Cusack movie waiting for it all to end. It was just an extension of my usual everyday life. Every now and then I’ll snap out of this absenteeism, realise that I’m eating Roquefort and Cold Cuts opposite Luxembourg Gardens and start making stunning self realisations… only to just forget about them a little while later.
A woman I matched on Tinder asked me what I was doing in Paris and I replied, ‘To see why people fall in love with Paris?’
To which she responded ‘Why not in Paris?’ and I swooned but forgot to reply. Such is my haunting on this trip.
Something happened to me when I hit my late 20s. I became mad and angry and bitter and sad at the world. I got hurt a few times, not that many though truthfully. Disappointed over too many things and happy too few times. I have the knowledge to catch myself in this haze though. So actually, I’m almost consciously making decisions to maintain this uncharismatic, depressing human I’ve become when I initially meet people but feel powerless to stop it.
I’ve had the chance to see my father this trip. For all of my life he has been the MC of the party. He can effortlessly engage in deep charismatic conversation with waiters, hotel staff, locals as if he has known them from growing up in Coburg. He told this entirely random waiter my life story and the waiter for his part seemed excited to hear about it. I once felt I had a good handle on the balance of my fathers charisma, while balancing my own experiences awareness of today's social norms. I wouldn’t post ‘Love you, Son’ on all my kids selfies on Instagram, is the example of something my pop has done, and still does. It has become apparent to me now that I had lost this understanding by, strangely enough, living independently in Japan over the last 4 years.
When you become an adult, and I don’t mean by turning 21, I mean by living a life that leads you down a certain path where your failings are your own and you must face the consequences of them, these are the things you need to be reminded of. That once you had a smile on your face about seeing a sunrise over Tokyo. That waking up with someone you really really liked was something you looked forward to, not avoided. That connecting with people was something you strove for. That happiness was your responsibility. As those motivational posters will tell you, life is what you make it.
With my last meal in Paris, Gwen, the quirky, cute waitress at Le Verre Mole in Paris’s 10th is looking at me through her cute Parisian glasses and a short haired fringe. She smiles endearingly and asks ‘How was the meal?’
I stop taking my cash out, raise my head to look at her and say ‘Well… there was just one problem’
‘Oh?’
‘Look honestly, it was too good. How am I supposed to leave Paris when I know I won’t get that plate again?’ I quip with a slight smile and my hand brushing the back of my head trying to be my cute.
‘Ah. That only means you have to come back. Where in Australia are you from?’ She replies. I never mentioned I was. She picked up my accent from just when I ordered. She showed me that I’m present. I’m not a shadow. What’s the point in hiding?
She tells me she grew up in Perth.
She finds out I live in Tokyo.
That I drink coffee at Fuglen.
That next time I go there, say ‘Hey’ to the manager and spin him out because they‘re close friends. Maybe have a conversation with him too.
We find out things we never would have if I just paid and left.
And as I leave, I catch myself again wondering what it means for me to be nice. Is it being the shadow that I have been for the last 4 years? Thinking that being unremarkable and normal will get me somewhere in life. Avoiding the pit in my stomach I get when I want to tell a pretty girl that I’d like to know her. Avoiding it all because I’m angry or cold or too cool to pretend I haven’t been hurt.
I don’t think I’m about that.
If this trip teaches me anything I hope that it’s for that to be true. I need to work tirelessly to ensure I don’t fall into my old traps.
I’ll find a way to figure things out
