I continue to be a work in progress. One of my most recent activities, aside from birdwatching, reading, and binging the second season of Bridgerton, has been trying to stop myself from typing I hope this note finds you well, on my email correspondence. The sentiment is true enough, although the words themselves are automatic and now meaningless after so many years of typing them, especially during the ongoing pandemic.
Face-to-face greetings also have become a challenge. I’ve yet to settle on a response to the typical greeting and “how are you?” exchange. I can’t say well, even though it’s grammatically correct. Are any of us “well” right now? Good doesn’t work either. Not that I’m a pedant, but I do worry about grammar to an extent, especially as a teacher whose friends will chastise me for misplaced commas in my social media posts. There are rules for punctuation—someday I will learn them.
When my supervisor recently asked after me, I told him I was fine and found myself wilting under his scrutiny as he stopped his forward trajectory down the hall and stared at me. “Fine?” he huffed as I smiled and tried to joke, but he didn’t let me off the hook. According to him, “fine” is one of the worst four-letter words out there. Personally, I find “peas” the worst, but I held that thought as he asked some incisive questions to try to get to the heart of my less-than-good reply.
Fine has a bad reputation in modern usage. It’s often considered the passive-aggressive response to something with which we do not find ourselves fine. We might as well be direct and say, “no,” or “I don’t agree,” or “yes, those jeans totally make your ass look fat.”
What else do we say, though, when someone asks us now how we are doing? I remember working with a student from Russia a few years ago who chastised me for asking “how are you?” as a greeting while passing her in the hallway. She noted that if I really cared, I would stop moving and listen to her response. I’ve been so aware of how I greet people since then, normally relying on good to see you when it really is and a simple hello when I’m having a less-than-fine day. Will “how are you” soon disappear like handshakes? Elbow touches and fist-bumps seem cheerier somehow.
I don’t think my social skills are rusty from the pandemic. Rather, I find myself wanting more meaningful exchanges. My friend, Chelsey, has a good substitution that involves us asking each other, “how is your brain?” It helps us cut through the palaver and speak our truths. And it’s not just happening amongst friends. I’ve noticed the baristas at the drive through coffee shop no longer ask how I am but instead just request my order.
Moving through the pandemic, I’ve decided that it’s okay to stop reaching for what David Foster Wallace called our banal platitudes—those automatic phrases that no longer have meaning because they are so rote. The “how are you” exchange is different now. As people come out of isolation or other challenging situations, they may need what my Russian student needed: someone to actually listen, respond, and offer help. If someone is brave enough to admit to feeling less-than-fine, I would argue that I have a moral obligation to offer as much of myself as I can to them. The problem now though is that many of us are running on fumes. I know that people have written about “compassion fatigue,” especially for healthcare workers. Allow me to be bold and say that I believe many of us are suffering from “bullshit fatigue.” We no longer have the energy to be fake—but we also no longer have the energy to be too real, either.
Perhaps we’re moving toward a cultural norm where it is perfectly acceptable just to say “hello.” And it’s perfectly acceptable to return a simple “hello.” Someday soon maybe, just maybe, fine will lose its passive-aggressive status and be the response we need it to be. Dream that dream with me, will you?
By the way, I’m fine. Really. Hello.
