It’s easy to dismiss something when, overall, it wasn’t that impressive or didn’t meet expectations. I read or watch something, meet someone, or experience something, and it assess that it was ‘ok’. Certainly not awful, but, in retrospect, I’m not sure I would do it again. Often though, amid the critical thoughts, some small good things will come to mind, just in passing. I might just briefly mention and entertain them, before proceeding to condemn the whole thing as not worth the trouble. They’re not central to the whole, and so they’re easily passed over. What if those small good things, though, redeem the whole experience?

Naturally, if I had had the choice, I might have preferred to get only those one or two things, delivered cleanly and efficiently on their own. But that was not an option on the table. Moreover, those things can be all the more memorable since I had to work for them and then discovered them serendipitously. If you stop to consider it, many, maybe most, experiences don’t bring you anything of lastly significance. From this perspective, the provision of one insight or a bit of knowledge that you can carry with you could, in many cases, be enough to make the whole experience worth it. As comedian Jared Fried once observed, if he bombs a sets but takes away one good line, that set was a success. 

I read a book called Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business. I took one thing from it: when someone says “thank you”, don’t say “no problem”; instead say “you’re welcome” or “my pleasure”. “No problem” makes it sound as if the person would otherwise be bothering you but happened not to inconvenience you. “You’re welcome” is warm and generous. In the lengthy story of how the the restauranteur Danny Meyer built his restaurant empire, this was a mere footnote, only tangentially related to main subject. That small lesson, of which I remind myself on a daily basis, was enough though, and I’m grateful to have read his book.

During my recent foray back into philosophy, I picked up another book called The_Illusion_of_the_End, by Jean Beaudrillard. A classic work of continental philosophy, it was wandering and abstruse. I won’t pretend to have understood it. I did, however, come across two intriguing thoughts. Firstly, the application of the ecological paradigm to culture shows that thoughts, like things, do not get destroyed. Rather, they get recycled, and the question is not how they can be eradicated but how they can be repurposed or remade towards some new, perhaps more salubrious end. Secondly, belief and existence are inversely correlated. Belief is precisely for things that don’t exist, and therefore it’s natural that as the objective status of something is undermined belief in it should rise. The truly existing thing does not need belief to be sustained; it simply is and is known. I’m not even sure the second point is anything profound or non-trivial. But, together with the first insight, it stuck with me. While I can’t say I understood Beaudrillard’s thesis or the major import of the book, I would say it was worth reading to have those two ideas implanted in my mind.

There are so many experiences and encounters that are disappointing in a certain sense. We don’t get from them what we had hoped or what they were ostensibly offering. But they leave us with small, seemingly random gifts, which are easy to neglect or even lose. They might be particular to you, which is to say that for idiosyncratic reasons certain very specific things may have resonated with or been helpful to you. If you appreciate these and cherish them on their own merits, the experience or encounter can sometimes be entirely redeemed. The onus is reversed, and the question becomes not why you didn’t get more but whether you got anything.