Liz and I went to another amazing concert last Friday — the Flaming Lips opened for Weezer. We were excited for both bands, but the openers struck a strange chord with us. The Flaming Lips are notoriously weird, and they definitely made a memorable spectacle of their music, but it was their behavior between songs that threw us both for a loop.
Before playing, Wayne Coyne would coax the whole crowd to “Give it up!” Prompting an audience to clap and cheer is hardly unusual at a rock concert, but we began rolling our eyes at the incessant requests to “Keep going!” and “Make some more noise!” At one point, he insisted that we scream and applaud until Weezer came out, promising us an … *ahem* euphoric mental state.
“He’s really milking it!” I shouted to Liz over the roaring guitars. “Like, he seems insecure!”
She nodded. “I just want to hear the music!”
Wayne must not have heard us, because he kept urging the crowd to shout and clap every chance he got. Near the end of their set, a funny thought struck me: We come to concerts to hear to the band, but the band goes on stage because they want to hear us.
It was an interesting observation in the moment, but it kept working on me over time…
In a fascinating interview with Tim Ferriss, lion tracker Boyd Varty shared several deeply personal stories about living on Londolozi Game Reserve in South Africa. As an expert storyteller, Varty wove each tale with wit, detail, and impeccable comic timing. He also unpacked many of them with a deep and unique insight one rarely encounters in our society.
Take, for instance, the story of when Varty waded too far into a stream and a crocodile viciously latched on to his leg, dragging him under. Through sheer luck, Boyd kicked his way free and clambered onto the opposite shore, where the creature pursued him. When Varty cried out for help, a fellow guide rushed across the waters to rescue him, despite the sure presence of an aggressive crocodile in between them.
When his companion pulled him to safety, Varty asked, “Solly, why did you come in the water?”
Solly’s response? “Mfo, una nkinga ndina nkinga phela!” My brother — you’re in trouble, I’m in trouble!
Depending on your attitude, this might come across as either false modesty or a rare sentiment between dear friends. Varty, however, framed it very differently.
“In South Africa,” he explained, “the people have an Ubuntu consciousness. Ubuntu is an African philosophy that says, ‘I am because of you,’ and what Ubuntu is talking to is the relational nature of life. When you spend time with people where the Ubuntu consciousness is activated in them, they experience things in relation. They know that knowing yourself and being yourself is about being connected to people.
“So Solly was showing that Ubuntu consciousness comes alive in action — through courageous action in that case. What he was showing me that day was how deeply ingrained it was in him, the collective nature of life.”
Near the end of the aforementioned concert, well into Weezer’s phenomenal set, I got swept up in the music, singing and air-guitaring along to all my favorite hits. As they played their penultimate tune, Holiday, a guy stormed down the steps beside me. He lunged into the row in front of us, forging a path with a beer in his outstretched fist. He came to a halt after shoving past three people, suddenly realizing he was in the completely wrong section.
Without a word, he reversed course and turned to rush back up the steps. He made it two strides before falling flat on his face. He narrowly missed the railing with his head, smacking it instead on the concrete. His body was so close I could almost nudge him with my shoe, but I stared down at his motionless form, frozen myself. The music faded from my ears as as my head filled with confusion.
Dang — he’s wasted!
Is he going to get up?
Should I help him?
Then, just as quickly as he went down, he sprang back up, taking the stairs two at a time toward the exit.
Liz elbowed me and I turned, still reeling. “Was he alright?” she shouted. “I think he hit his head!”
I frowned at her. “I’m not an EMT,” I replied stupidly. I shook my head and tried to get back into the music. It bled back into my ears, the lights flaring along with the beat, but I struggled to sink into the groove again. I tried to bounce along, but it was like my heart had a sour taste in it. The steps were empty, strobed by the climactic pyrotechnics, but that stranger remained there in my mind, sprawled out beside me.
I’m not an EMT? Really? Do you need any special training in life to lend somebody a hand? How can an arm’s length seem so long?
Maybe it was the fear that he would hurt me if I touched him.
Maybe it was a sense of superiority, like he deserved to fall down because he let himself get drunk.
It could have been the simple fact that I was annoyed — he had interrupted my good time at a concert with his inconvenient injury.
Whatever it was, it wasn’t a side of myself that I was proud to have at the steering wheel in that moment.
I hate to say this, but when people around me are hurting — either in some noticeable physical way or showing unfavorable emotions — I tend to reject them. Push them away with judgment. Assume they’re acting that way because they are inferior to me – they made some wrong choice, or they are weak in some way, or they are not simply worth my time.
If I do feel a twinge of empathy, I might tell myself I don’t have the ability to help them. If my feelings are more mixed, I might assume they are somebody else’s problem. When my heart is harder, I might think I have something more important going on and I can’t be bothered.
Maybe that’s the kind of person I wanna be.
Maybe that’s the best I can do.
But if that’s true, I can’t pretend that I walk some moral high road. I don’t have a right to believe that I am concerned about human well-being if I can’t even entertain an attitude that is oriented toward compassion for others. How can I act like I’m so concerned about the state of the world, about the suffering of those in far-off lands or even nearby cities, when I can watch a man fall in his face right next to me and not even attempt to help him?
I fell on my face in that moment.
And I’m still trying to get up from it.