© Kiya. Image from BigStockPhoto.com

I was visiting in Utah recently, driving on snowy and icy roads. Having lived in tropical climates for the past twenty years, I braked the car intentionally several times to see if I remembered how to steer out of a slide.

Because I had taken drivers’ education during the winter, we had practiced the “skid and recovery” maneuver in an empty parking lot behind the school. The instructor had told us that because steering out of a slide is counter-intuitive, we needed to practice and practice until it became an automatic response to do the right thing and not what logic would dictate.

Steering the Tongue

While I was driving, I contemplated relationships with family and friends, with whom I would be in close contact with for a few days, and I was aware that I would likely have multiple opportunities for my natural (wo)man to do all the wrong things and to give in to my first (and usually wrong) instinct. The comparison was not lost on me. I told myself to remember to stop and think before I acted, to do what was counter-intuitive and “steer out of the skid.”

Sure enough, opportunities arose. It usually took just a few moments for me to subdue my feelings and figure out another better way to deal with things than my first instinctual reaction.

I am all too prone to anger, sarcasm and defensiveness, yet experience has taught me that those emotions and their attendant actions never bring the desired outcome. Still, logic would indicate that unkindness ought to be returned with unkindness. If another person around us is being selfish, we decide we had best mark out our own territory and get what we can get while the getting is good. If there has been a slight, either real or imagined, we feel a need to give someone a “taste of their own medicine.”

On those occasions that I have done what is emotionally counter-intuitive, I have often marveled at the results. It’s almost as if I hear a voice echoing in my head:

“Love your enemies.”

“Be slow to anger.”

“Do good to those that despitefully use you and persecute you.¨”

Against Inclination

I remember a time I did the opposite of what I was inclined to do. It wasn’t even my own idea. Arriving home from my job at the local laundry and dry cleaner, I complained to my college roommate, Holly, about how crabby, Roberta, the supervisor at work was. Immediately Holly came out with this “Molly Mormon” remark about how Roberta was probably unhappy and how it would be a good idea to do an act of service for her.

I didn’t feel like doing anything nice for her, but I decided it was a stupid enough idea that it might work. I was short on funds, though, and could not think of what I could possibly do for sourpuss Roberta. I knew I wanted to do it anonymously, because I did not want to seem insincere or appear to be trying to gain favor with her. Besides, it just would not make sense to do something nice for a woman who counted the number and length of my bathroom breaks during the day.

My mother had given me a set of note cards with different cheerful messages. For the cost of a few postage stamps, I decided to send one to Roberta every work day until they ran out. I angled my handwriting and wrote as sloppily as I could, being careful to make a few letters with large loops, different than I usually wrote. I can’t say the message was especially heartfelt, because my overwhelming feeling was hope that it would take the edge off her crabbiness, for me and for all my other long-suffering co-workers who might occasionally have need of spending more than a minute and ten seconds in the restroom.

We were all sitting around in the break room eating lunch when the first card arrived. I had not anticipated being able to see her reaction firsthand, but the postman handed her the company’s stack of mail when he arrived during lunchtime. She looked through the pile quickly for anything important that needed attention. I saw a quizzical look on her face as she picked out the small card addressed to her. She opened it and squinted at the message. “It’s not signed. Who would send me a card here at work?” she questioned. She passed the card around the table and asked us all if we recognized the handwriting. There were comments as it made the rounds.

“Maybe you’ve got a secret admirer.”

“The handwriting is kind of sloppy. It could be a guy.”

“Nah. Guys don’t send cards like this. It’s a woman.”

She speculated on the number of people who knew where she worked and wondered out loud. “I’ve had a falling out with my sister-in-law. Maybe she’s sorry but doesn’t have the courage to apologize.”

It may have been my imagination that first day, but Roberta did not seem quite her militant self when a co-worker made a mistake. She handled it, but seemed a little softer in her approach.

Usually the cards were delivered during our lunch break, and she always shared them with those of us who brought our lunches. “Here’s another one! This is driving me crazy. Who could it be?” One day she asked each of us to write our names on a piece of paper so she could check the handwriting for similarities. No match, thanks to my expert handwriting disguise abilities.

Throwing Her Off Track

When Roberta got the letters, her speculation gave me clues as to what to put in upcoming notes. She would mention different people she did not get along with. This came as no surprise to me, because the woman had an acid tongue. I penned vague notes of pseudo-apology that would throw her off the track.

“Sorry I haven’t been a better friend to you.”

She would pounce on every scrap of evidence, announcing to us that she had figured out who it was. Then the next note would say something that shed suspicion on someone else. Every once in a while I would say something that would draw suspicion back to her co-workers.

“Okay, who knows that I work Saturdays and take Wednesdays off?”

Every once in a while, I noticed her smiling as she went about her duties. THEN it happened. I made a mistake — a significant one I had to tell her about so she could fix it. I braced myself for the tirade, but it didn’t come. Quietly she did what she needed to do to repair my error.

The box of note cards ran out, and my budget was tight, but I figured it was worth it to keep the cards coming, so I bought some more. I even picked out a couple of expensive greeting cards for special occasions. I mentioned the experiment in a letter to my cousin serving a mission in California, and so I decided to enclose a stamped sealed note to Roberta and asked him to post it from Los Angeles. I had no idea that an employee that Roberta had had a falling out with was taking a trip that week to California with her husband. After Roberta got the card from California, she told us all the realized that Barbara was the mastermind behind the notes and cards and upon Barbara’s return home, she mended their recently-broken friendship. Then she told us all over lunch that Barb swore on a stack of Bibles that she had not sent any of the notes. It was too late, though, because they were friends again.

I then started sending them to all the missionaries with whom I corresponded. She got notes from Michigan and from Alaska, among other places. I have to admit I enjoyed messing with her mind a little too much, watching her trying to figure out who her phantom friend might be. I had only wanted her to be a little nicer at work, but the net effect was that the notes put almost everyone with whom Roberta had close contact under an umbrella of suspicion and it seemed she was nicer to co-workers and customers. I assumed it also spilled over in her dealings with family and friends.

I have no idea how many relationships were healed along the way or how many people in her life noticed an improvement in her disposition all because of a simple suggestion from my roommate and a little creativity.

When I quit that job, I kept sending the notes for another few months, not wanting her to associate the end of my employment with the end of the notes, and also as an act of service to those who had not yet escaped the sweatshop.

I know it can work, and I hope the day will come that doing the right thing, the kind thing and the generous thing becomes my default reaction. In the meantime, I need to find a vacant parking lot to practice in so that I limit the number of times that I skid into the ditch. In the meantime, I have towing covered through AAA.