I love opportunities to be the gracious one. It may be the genre of experience I find most satisfying in all the world, no doubt because I know in my heart how discourteous and unaccommodating I truly am.
Today I got to be gracious about a colleague's keeping me waiting an hour and a half for, and ultimately canceling, a meeting he'd requested. Better yet, the meeting was to have been entirely for his benefit -- he's teaching a course I taught last year and wanted to make use of the fruits of my experience in his own planning.
Was I even particularly inconvenienced? I was not. I hung out in my own office doing other things, and left when I was done for the day. Was he ungrateful? He was not. He sent me a nice apologetic email. It was the ideal circumstance for graciousness. Everyone emerged from the experience happier, bathed in a pleasant glow of mutual good feeling.
The day after the Kanye West flapdoodle, Steve read me an excerpt from some commentary or other,* in which the writer observed that the story being told went about like so: Kanye West behaved like an ass by grabbing the microphone away from Taylor Swift and saying that Beyoncé should have won instead, taking up all the time for her acceptance speech and completely ruining her big moment. But what about Beyoncé? this writer asked. When she won the award for Best Video later, she gave up her own acceptance speech to invite Taylor Swift back up on stage so that she could use the time instead. That was nice of her, of course, but boo! suck! Why should she have been put in such a position?
My immediate and highly sensitive reaction, naturally, was to say: "But she got the chance to be gracious! That's the greatest gift on earth!"
This is why I love academia. The base level standards for gracious behavior among faculty are so thrillingly, achievably low. My fundamental temperament, I'm afraid, is that of E. T. A. Hoffmann's smug and oblivious tomcat Kater Murr, who muses: "Can there be any more comfortable condition than to be wholly satisfied with oneself?" Indeed, surely there cannot.
*Fantastic citation there, me.
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