Lessons About Community By Way of a Laundromat
My wife and I love to travel. For three years now, we’ve set our sights abroad, visiting cities like Paris, Cologne, Bonn, Gdansk, and other destinations. It’s enriching to leave the familiar behind and explore another culture. The beauty of these experiences is made even more joyful and memorable by visits with family who live not too far from Cologne.
So much time and planning goes into these trips, and they’re over in the blink of an eye. As we’ve gotten better with navigating the diverse cultures we’ve explored, it means time has only accelerated, slipping by faster and faster.
It’s always easy to remember the big moments—like visiting The Louvre or a particularly unique dining experience. But the beauty about traveling a foreign country is that there are plenty of smaller moments that can burrow into your memory and fundamentally change how you look at the world.
To make traveling easier, my wife and I pack as light as we can, which means we often have to do laundry abroad. This means planning for downtime to wash clothes, as well as packing items like detergent. In theory, doing laundry sounds simple enough, but in practice it can lead to unique situations that bond you to the people around you.
On one particular trip to a laundromat abroad, my wife and I were struggling with navigating how to pay in order to activate a washing machine. We used a translation app to help with scrolling the menu, but for the life of us, the card reader on the machine wouldn’t work. We tried paper currency, but the machine kept spitting out our bills.
A man waiting for his clothes to finish in the dryer noticed our struggles. He came over and tried to help us, but we spoke two different languages with few words understood between us. Hand gestures helped, but it wasn’t until he pulled out a coin did communication fully click—our translation of how to operate the machine was correct; the machine was just partially broken. It wouldn’t accept card, and it would no longer accept paper currency. Only coins would work.
The man gave us a couple of coins to get us started, but I would need to walk to the convenience store next door to trade paper money for coins. After using what words I knew and a few more hand gestures, we were in business. My wife and I could clean our clothes.
I shook our helper’s hand and offered him some money for the coins he gave us. He graciously waved me off, and I took it to mean that it wasn’t necessary. An exchange of looks told me that he was just happy to help, that in here, it was one person doing another a good deed.
While our clothes were in the wash, another couple entered the laundromat. The routine my wife and I went through began again, and we stepped in to explain the situation. This vacationing couple spoke the same language as us, so we were able to quickly convey that the machine was broken and would only accept coins.
A little while later, yet another person entered. As you can probably guess, she, too, struggled with the machine. Through hand gestures and finding shared words and partial phrases, two couples worked together to pay it forward and help another person in need.
Moments like these are commonplace. The best laid plans are often met with a break somewhere along the line. When you’re in the throes of it, you don’t think much of the how or why of solving the problem, but after the fact, it’s easy to see that it’s the humanity and kindness of other people that can help us overcome our challenges.
In that moment, the laundromat was a community of people helping each other work the machines. It was a bond that crossed languages and nationalities, and it was built out of the desire to keep others from struggling needlessly.
With nearly everything in life, we need a community to see us through. We need those bonds from our neighbors, coworkers, family members, and friends to lift us up and in turn be lifted by us.
Because We Can (this newsletter) is about the compulsion to create and share art, whether that means short stories and novels or paintings, music, etc. It’s tethered to this idea of community, to this notion that we want to lift each other up as fellow artists, as well as lift up those around us who need a good story, song, or picture to inspire them to move forward and witness another sunrise.
In a world of uncertainty and turmoil, we need each other now more than ever.
Keep making your art. Keep sharing it with those around you. Most importantly, keep encouraging yourself and those around you to tap into that humanity and empathy in order to add more beauty to the world. Always.
I believe in you.
We’re all in this together,
Scott
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P.P.S. Here are the latest happenings in my neck of the woods:
I started a new newsletter called Books & Boards. Find the introductory issue here.
I have a new video review of Defenders of the Earth #7.