Your Thing Is Kind of Slow

A few days ago, the timing chain on my motorcycle snapped.

The bike had very low mileage, absurdly low mileage for that kind of failure, but there it was: dead. So suddenly I was back on a bicycle.

One evening the shops were already closed, and I had to ride to a 24-hour Migros, one of Switzerland’s big supermarket chains, instantly recognizable here by its orange signs. A 24-hour Migros is the sort of place that seems partly designed to reassure you that civilization has not completely collapsed after 8 p.m.

On the way back, I saw an older man in a battery-powered wheelchair struggling in the middle of the road. Something had fallen, or he had stopped for some reason, and I helped him a little.

His wheelchair was moving painfully slowly.

So I told him.

“Your thing is kind of slow.”

He said, “Yeah, I’m out of breath.”

That struck me as funny, because he was sitting in an electric wheelchair.

A little later I asked whether he was going home.

He said yes, more or less, that he had dropped something and would continue on.

So I asked whether he was going to a party that evening.

It was not exactly the sort of conversation you find in a handbook on communicating with vulnerable people.

Afterwards, for a moment, I wondered whether I had been too sloppy. Maybe I had said something stupid. Maybe I had gone too far.

But then I thought about the conversation again.

The man had not seemed offended. Quite the opposite. After we had sorted out the practical problem, he introduced himself. We did not become lifelong friends on the side of the road, obviously, but there was a small moment of ordinary human contact.

And I began to wonder whether we often worry about the wrong thing.

We worry about words.

We worry about saying the correct thing, using the correct term, choosing the correct formulation. German has a wonderful expression for this: jedes Wort auf die Goldwaage legen — literally, “to put every word on the gold scales.” It means weighing every word with extreme care, as if the slightest imprecision might prove costly.

But perhaps what matters more is the position from which the words are spoken.

There is another German word that is difficult to translate: Haltung. Literally it can mean posture or bearing. But when applied to a person, it means something more. It is your inner stance toward the world and toward other people: what you believe, how you position yourself, and the way those convictions quietly shape how you behave. “Attitude” comes close, but sounds too casual. “Stance” comes close, but sounds too intellectual. Haltung contains both.

What made the conversation possible, I think, was that somewhere underneath it was a simple thought:

This could be me.

Not metaphorically. Literally.

An accident, an illness, a stroke of bad luck, and the seating arrangement could be reversed.

That matters because sympathy does not necessarily abolish distance. It can even reinforce it. I am standing here, fortunate and able-bodied, feeling compassion for you over there.

But recognizing vulnerability as shared does something different.

It makes the distinction temporary.

The wheelchair stops marking the border between two kinds of people and becomes one of the places a human life can end up.

And that changes language.

If I no longer feel that I am addressing someone from across a category boundary, I have less need for a special vocabulary. I can risk ordinary conversation: a stupid observation, a joke, a question about whether he is going to a party.

I am not handling him.

I am talking to him.

That, I think, is where linguistic ease comes from.

Not from carelessness, and not from pretending that differences do not exist, but from refusing to turn those differences into a hierarchy.

The man in the wheelchair knew he was in a wheelchair.

I knew he was in a wheelchair.

There was no need for either of us to pretend otherwise.

This does not mean words are harmless.

Some words injure regardless of the speaker’s intentions. A slur does not become harmless because the person using it claims to mean well. In institutional settings, a label on a form can affect somebody’s life whether or not the person who wrote it had good intentions.

Words can carry consequences of their own.

The point is narrower.

Careful language cannot manufacture an equality that is absent underneath it.

Someone can know every approved term and still radiate pity, fear, superiority or distance. And excessive caution can create exactly the thing it is trying to avoid. The speaker becomes so busy demonstrating that he knows how to speak to a disabled person that the person himself begins to disappear.

Haltung is harder.

There is no approved vocabulary for it.

You actually have to mean it.

You have to believe, somewhere below the level of manners, that the person in front of you belongs to the same world you do. That his life is not some strange deviation from ordinary human existence, but one of its possibilities.

Maybe that is why slightly imperfect conversations can sometimes feel more human than flawless ones.

A joke can be clumsy. A sentence can be badly phrased. Someone can say something that would look terrible if isolated in a training manual. And yet both people may understand perfectly well what is happening between them.

Maybe we spend too much time teaching people what to say. Perhaps we should spend more time asking them where they are speaking from. Because if the position is wrong, perfect words will not save the conversation.

And if the position is right, the words can afford to be a little messy.