At Sherman Oaks Galleria today we wandered into the hairdresser Paul Mitchell's, a teaching salon. It was huge but what impressed me most was the mobile-free zone ('please turn off your mobile') and the list of instructions:
- 'I am present and listen with a focused mind;
- 'I show my gratitude and respect to those present;
- 'I am a brilliant learner who is passionate about my growth'
I also liked the 10 'rules' they had up on the board, with the first being Create Magic: always be welcoming and nice (or words to that effect).
Once again, here is that service ethic, and of course over the counter was 'Service is the rent we pay for room on this earth', but when I compare what I saw here with yesterday's train trip I wonder if there is a larger lesson:
On the train at Emeryville was the guy who had set out about ten years ago to become the best bartender in the world, and ate 'tuna for eight months' in order to save up enough money to learn from the previous best, and the woman who explained to us details of sign language that proved to us that it is as rich as any other language, and what's more, like any other languages, shows us life from another perspective. (Just as Central Australian languages may teach us different ways to look at shade or the various things you can do with wood, deaf sign language can reveal the detail observable by people who use their eyes more than the hearing do.) I then met someone (a nutritional epidemiologist) who spoke Urdu (and today I met someone who speaks Pangasinan).
As we swapped into buses and left sunny Bakersfield, climbed up through the Tejon Ranch to where camel-coloured hills were backed by larger ones flecked with snow, and then down again to Newhall/Santa Clarita where there were Spanish-mission style buildings and palm trees again, I sat next to a woman who works for DTS who are apparently working on 3-D sound to go with your iPhone, videos, etc... I thought of the potential for opera in multiplexes. What more was there to learn in a single trip?
And I wondered if the whole of America is a school, an open book for those willing and able to learn?
well, it was part of the American ethic and what I think was the major contributor to making it great. But I wonder if that is also closely tied to the capitalist ethic?
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