I just returned home from Paris and I was thinking over the last week about something I noticed there which was a completely different kind of attitude and approach to life. I know sometimes Americans can have this impression or perception of the French as being a bit standoffish or rude. I have spent quite a bit of time in France in my life and I will admit I come with the slight advantage of speaking adequate French- not great but enough that in certain situations French people will speak French back to me. However, I was in several situations where I really experienced the care that French people give to their service in how they are approaching their jobs specifically and it really impressed me. It’s not something that I really see all the time here at home especially of late, where we live in a hurried and striving culture. I was just so impressed with the thoroughness: for example when you ask for something in a shop and perhaps the person pulls out eight different things related to what you’re talking about and goes through each one with you. Yes, sometimes this slows the process down quite a bit, or the efficiency I guess is what an American point of view would say. But I was just really taken by the care and also feeling like it wasn’t a big imposition to the person. It was really just someone doing their job and trying to do their best. I saw this in a restaurant when I told someone that I had an allergy and just the specificity of the questions they were asking me and coming back multiple times to tell me to avoid this thing or perhaps to ask me if this was not part of my allergy. Also, my trip to the pharmacist looking for reading glasses for the first time and going thru all of them with me one by one and giving me an impromptu vision test. I guess my question is where does this get lost in cultures because I don’t feel like this at home very often where I am shown this kind of care.
I think in my own work and in the way that I run my shop I try very hard to impress this mentality into it and how it runs. I think there’s a lot of beauty in this care and I just wonder if it leads to a bit happier of a culture? I felt like people took a lot of pride in the things around them there. Andrew and I were talking one night and he was noticing the beauty of Paris and commented that people bother to make the effort to do things to preserve it just for the state of the aesthetics of Paris alone. I think also people tend to follow rules more so if there’s a boundary or a limitation in place people seem more lenient to respect that. Whereas sometimes I feel here that people will just do whatever they feel they can get away with. This seems to just contribute to the decline of society, which is what we’re seeing a lot of these days. I’m not saying that I think that everyone should be a rule follower and we should all just fall in line that is not my point. But I think this common good and happiness within your own metier is an interesting idea and feeling connected to your surroundings and responsibility to it. Perhaps also it remains to be said that people are probably compensated better for their jobs and have more protections in place so they’re more happy to be content and not striving perhaps as much or maybe this striving just looks different and I don’t perceive its intricacies.
I guess it was just interesting for me to be in a place where I related to it culturally a bit more with respect to how things were done. I really enjoy the idea of quietly surpassing people’s expectations or trying to go above and beyond without it being such a big deal. I think in the states we think of that is a very specialized thing or a very high-end experience but not an everyday thing. But in France I just felt like over and over again I was having an experience where people were very thorough in how they were doing their work on all scales and levels and it seemed to make them very happy to do so. I would be interested to know what other things people have noticed culturally when traveling. I just was very inspired by it and it made me feel very in tune and also connected to something I was experiencing. I was excited to get home to work. I’ll write more about Paris this week, but I thought I would take a moment to write this down and see what people thought.
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xx Katherine
This made me immediately think of my work as a teacher years ago- one of most beautiful tenets of Montessori philosophy is the idea of care for the environment and others as the very foundation of community work. Helping each other well is honorable. You do the jobs to better the environment, (and yourself in the process! ) not to rush through as fast as possible. This respect for all kinds work is lost on a culture that hold wealth up over all other things. I think the idea of caring, value in each individual and their contributions is something the US has always struggled with and it shows in everything, everywhere.
oh, this is such an amazing topic, so please forgive me for my soon to be immense comment about how i have perceived different cultures iwi ! (i'll be back later)~