Lost in translation

I sometimes joke that my husband Jon is the best thing about America: committed to service, a literal Boy Scout who’s always making things better. He is preternaturally kind and a Southerner.

So it was a bit of a jolt when, visiting my family in Sweden, he asked a question that made the room go uncomfortably quiet.

We were in the kitchen, the breakfast table laden with coffee, fermented yogurt, toast with cheese and marmalade. An old friend was visiting from Stockholm and Jon turned to her and asked, “So - how’ve you been?”

Oh dear. The room came to a halt. Our friend stuttered, choking coffee.

“How have I - what do you mean? When?”

How you’ve been - as my mother and I tried to explain - isn’t a question you can just toss off to a Swede. Among my Swedish friends and family, it takes time to earn the intimacy of this kind of knowing.

But perhaps what’s really lost in translation here is that how you’ve been has no entry point - it needs a moment in time, a placement and location.

How were you this morning, awed by the hummingbird at the bee balm, the sun in the trees, the smells - sweet fern, morning, tea, earth - intoxicating and elemental?

Or, how were you yesterday, embroiled in old patterns, restless and tired, noticing dense air and a feeling of stuckness?

We are so many things, so many ways, deeply influenced by the people and timing and places around us. And all of these qualities are inexorably bound together. To package up how you’ve been with a broad brush (the cheerful Just great! How about you?) would blanche the color from this wide palette.

Susan Cain talks about this in her lovely book Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole: “The bittersweet is also about the recognition that light and dark, birth and death—bitter and sweet—are forever paired. ‘Days of honey, days of onion,’ as an Arabic proverb puts it.”

I was raised mostly in the U.S., but I also stutter and stammer when asked these well-intended questions. It wasn’t until I watched it occur that I realized how root-deep this awkwardness is.

Friends, as summer wanes and you’re asked how’ve you been, may you grant yourselves the space for befuddlement, for pause, for reworking the question as its been offered into something that gives actual entry.

And Jon, being Jon, immediately understood and adapted accordingly. “Sorry,” he said, “How are you this morning?”