Clean bathrooms, sewers, and making connections
Several things all kind of collided today in my brain; one, this post by Seth Godin, about clean bathrooms as an example/metaphor for expressing care and trust, and two, a lyric by the great (and woefully under-known) Tom Lehrer: “Life is like a sewer, what you get out of it depends on what you put into it.” Somehow, when you mix those two together inside my head, you get a result that explains why it’s easy to connect with some people deeply almost at first meeting, and almost impossible to break through with others.
Sewers, for almost everyone, conjure up a very poor image – dirty, nasty pipes with trash and waste – but that’s not a literal definition, and to some extent the common framework of “what a sewer is” speaks more to our societal habit of minimizing cost than anything else. Some people have a mental map that sets “storm sewers” for directing rainfall and preventing it from causing floods as a separate item from “waste sewers” where all the poo goes – many do not, because in many locales it was cheaper to make one set of pipes and put everything in them together. Even for storm sewers, they’re now subjected to oil from cars, fertilizers from yards and gardens, paint and other construction debris, and of course trash – but it was built to hold rainwater, that was its purpose. If we only put rainwater into it, you would be able to get rainwater out.
“Where is he going with all of this?,” I hear you ask in your head. If you have read the linked post from Seth Godin (no, I’m not going to quote it or paraphrase, go on, click the link already if you haven’t), he talks about what we do involves cleaning bathrooms – something that’s never a feature, doesn’t create sales or revenue, it removes a reason “why not”. When we interact with each other, ultimately, we end up with a lot of reasons “why not” queued up in our heads; those people we connect with are the ones who do the work of removing those “why nots”, of cleaning the restroom, of showing care and trust. Likewise, for some people we meet, their purpose in interacting, or ours, may not be the same – what we each put into it may be different, and so what we get out of it may become “why not” – they may see a sewer as a catch-all, a place to throw their empty Taco Bell wrappers, and you may feel that’s not okay.
There are some obvious observations to be made here about young-adult bathrooms, bachelor bathrooms, et.al., that in addition to being cheap humor also do still hold some truth in this light. Typically, as new adults, we don’t possess the skills and wisdom to see the value in someone else’s viewpoint, or in ensuring that our own viewpoint is heard because we’ve made sure to be welcoming to another’s. That usually comes with time, just like learning to be responsible for cleaning your own bathroom takes time – time to learn that while it’s not always fun to do, it has a purpose that outweighs the effort involved. Sometimes, we never really learn that, or depend on someone else for that, which leaves us stuck in a place we may feel trapped.
The work we put into how we act, the values we hold ourselves accountable to – when those match, or come close, the barrier to communicating becomes very low, and leaves you free to appreciate the “why” in spending time with someone. What you remember is the “why” – what they know, how they act, the way you feel around them – but what got you there was something you don’t remember, the safety and trust you felt from seeing a clean bathroom, so to speak.
Hard to fathom that somehow I’m going to spend the rest of my life explaining how to communicate with other people in terms of clean bathrooms, but there it is.