I was at one of my favorite cafes to work at, in Pasadena, some months ago.

The person sitting to my right, his phone kept vibrating every now and then. “He is getting bombarded by texts and alerts!” I thought to myself.

We were sitting on one long community table, and when his phone vibrated, the whole table vibrated. So I was feeling the tremors as well. And it was very distracting.

At first, I exercise patience. “It’s OK, Hitendra,” I told myself. “What a golden opportunity for you to practice equanimity.”

But after what must have been the 47^th vibration of his phone, I decided I had to bring an end to my misery. So I reached out and tapped his shoulder. “Sir, your phone is vibrating, like, every 5 seconds. Could you turn it to silent?”

“No, I won’t,” he retorted swiftly, not giving my proposal a moment’s consideration.

“But why not?” I inquired. “You’re not even paying attention to your phone. You’re working on your computer, just like I am trying to work on mine. So we’ll both be happier.”

“I won’t turn it off,” he said, as if I didn’t matter.

“That vibration, it carries all the way to me!” I protested. “And it’s really distracting me from doing what I’m doing.”

“If you’re getting disturbed,” he replied without a care, his arm regally sweeping across the cafe, “you can go and sit in some other part of the room.” He seemed to bask in some sense of logical victory.

“But look — I am so well settled here,” I observed. “I have my tea, my laptop is plugged in. I’ve got my bag. It’ll be so much easier for you to just put your phone on silent, and then we’ll both be fine.”

“It’s not going to happen,” he repeated, as he gave me one final fierce look before turning back to drown himself in his laptop.

“Sir, how will it hurt you to do something that makes me happy?” I persisted, committed to finding a crumb of goodness somewhere within him. “So just do it for me.”

By now, he wasn’t even bothering to respond.

“Really? You can’t do something so small, to make me happy?” I wasn’t ready to give up.

I decided to raise the stakes up a notch. “Oh,” I said, in a mixture of pain and exasperation, “This is what’s wrong with our country today!”

That got his attention. He turned toward me and asked in a demanding tone, “What did you mean by that?”

“We’re all so invested in our own selves, we’re not caring or doing for others around us, and we’re fighting, fighting, fighting. We don’t see things from the other side. It makes me so sad! I so wish we were more loving to each other.”

Suddenly, he seemed fully engaged. He took a deep breath and said, “I see. So if that’s what this is going to be about, then let me tell you something.”

I was ready for anything he was going to throw my way. Truth and virtue were on my side today!

“I was the one who was sitting here, quietly, doing my work. It is you who came here an hour ago and caused so much disruption,” he said.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“You were very loud! You were on your phone, settling in right here beside me, speaking so loudly.”

“Really? Was I?” I wondered. And then I remembered. When I had walked in, I was in the middle of a phone conversation with a colleague, discussing some ideas in a highly animated, passionate manner, quite oblivious to the environment around me.

“Oh, good heavens. You are right. I had my Airpods on. Was I really that loud?”

He nodded.

“Oh, that’s not good. I do need to learn to be more careful about how loud I can be. My wife scolds me too, at times, for speaking loudly in public when I have my Airpods on. I am so dearly sorry!”

As soon as I said “sorry”, his hand unconsciously reached for his phone to take it off the table and put it on his lap, signaling an end to the battle.

“Oh,” I said, allowing myself to speak from the heart, “You must have been so annoyed, and you didn’t even say anything to me all this time. And then here I am, telling you to stop your phone from vibrating. Listen, don’t worry, feel free to keep your phone the way it is. It’s a small thing, really.”

“It’s OK, it’s OK,” he said, his face a lot more relaxed, his tone warm. The phone was silenced, and there were no more bothersome table-tremors in the final 45 minutes of my time there.

When I stood up to leave, I touched him again on the shoulder.  “Can I buy you tea or coffee before I leave?” I asked.

He looked up, shook his head, and smiled warmly. We nodded at each other as I walked out, like brothers who were just parting temporarily.

I am glad that day I did not shy away from going to the margin — the margin where what is comfortable and good ends, and what is uncomfortable and bad begins. To engage in the full adventure of life we are called, at times, to go to that place.

And when we do, then we should heed Father Boyle’s words. “You just simply don’t go to the margins to make a difference. You go to the margins so that the folks at the margins make you different and that feels backwards.”

It feels “backwards” because the very people who you think are being bad may in fact end up reforming you in some way, small or big. That happens when you form what Father Boyle calls the “nexus of exquisitely mutual connection” — a connection “where we’re both returning each other to ourselves.”

This is such a beautiful idea. That when we help someone go from being bad to being good, we’re only returning them to themselves. For good is their true state, their inner core, and when they are not good, they have drifted away from it.

When you next have an upsetting encounter, for we all do from time to time, my wish for you is that you allow yourself to go to the margin to build a nexus of exquisitely mutual connection that gets you and your antagonist to return each other to yourselves.

Warmly,
Hitendra

Note: We had Father Boyle on my podcast recently. It gives me great joy to share that last week, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Honor for his service to humanity.

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