I have never trusted people who speak in tidy steps. The ones who walk into a room and start explaining your life back to you as if you were waiting for permission to move. I know it is not malice. I do not think it is envy either. Something in me just pulls back when someone arrives with that kind of certainty, the sort that never seems to hesitate in the middle of its own sentences.
Some of that comes from the shop. When you spend long enough around strangers, you notice how many people want to be known for what they understand rather than who they are. They carry advice like loose change. They press it into your hand before you can say you were only looking.
I had someone tell me how to price things once without ever having worked a till. Another man lectured a volunteer on the best way to fold knitwear. She nodded through the whole thing and then quietly refolded it the way she preferred as soon as he stepped outside. That is the thing about advice. Most of it only works for the person offering it.
There is always a bit of performance in the way people speak when they think they know something. A certain way they lean. A tone that suggests they are used to listeners. You can almost see the script flicking behind their eyes. They have practised it more times than they realise.
I have never been any good at that. Most days I am just trying to describe whatever is in front of me without pretending it is anything larger. If something makes sense, it usually makes sense because the room showed me a pattern at the right moment. Not because I pulled a truth out of thin air.
Cleverness does little for me. Most of the time it gets in the way.
It is usually when people try to be clever that everything shifts sideways. You become aware of yourself. Aware of the shape your words are taking. Aware of whoever you imagine is watching. You start arranging sentences instead of saying the thing you meant. By the end, whatever you were trying to say has slipped away and you are left with words that land neatly but carry very little weight.
The internet is filled with that kind of thing. People turning their days into instructions. People saying trust me when they have barely lived through the advice they are offering. They leave out the awkward parts. The luck. The moments that did not fit the story they wanted to tell. Little revelations held up as if they were precious.
Some days I scroll past it without thinking. Other days it makes me oddly tired. As if I am being spoken to by a room full of people who have never stopped long enough to notice how someone fidgets when they do not want to be seen. Or the way a customer holds a coat when they are deciding whether it belongs to them. Or how a volunteer slowly straightens a rail on a morning when they need something steady to do with their hands.
That is the kind of knowledge I trust. Quiet. Specific. Understated. The sort that arrives when you are not looking for it.
I suppose that is why I write these notes. Not because I have answers. I do not. Sometimes a thought lands and sits there for a while and the only way I can make sense of it is to put it down somewhere. Sometimes I think it matters. Sometimes I realise it was nothing more than a feeling that had not settled.
I am not convinced by my own reasoning half the time. I circle things. I return to them. Some pieces trail off. Some feel thinner when I come back a few days later. That is fine. Most things are thinner than we pretend.
There was a morning last week, or the week before, when one of my volunteers showed me a small trick she uses to keep coat hangers from tangling. I had probably seen her do it without noticing. It reminded me of the old elastic band fix people use to stop things slipping off. The sort of quiet solution you only learn by watching someone who is not trying to teach you anything.
I sometimes wonder if I would be better at things if I learned to speak with confidence. If I pretended to understand more than I do. It always looks exhausting. I would lose something in the process. I would rather keep whatever I have in its rough shape.
I do not say any of this out loud. There is no need. People believe what they want.
Most days I keep my head down and pay attention to whatever small thing is trying to be seen. If it stays with me, I write it down. The rest can drift. It was never asking for my attention anyway
About the author
Based in the U.K. Rowan Broadley writes about quiet systems, everyday behaviour, and the work of running a charity shop.
Notes
Header Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash
About the author
Based in the U.K. Rowan Broadley writes about quiet systems, everyday behaviour, and the work of running a charity shop.