Week Twenty-one: Actions Don't Mean What They Mean

After coming home from volunteering at a soup kitchen for 4 hours, I immediately took a shower and did nothing but watch Netflix for a few hours. It was honestly really tiresome - having about 3 new kids that don't know how to do anything and parents that think their child shouldn't be doing any of the work because they're still "young and weak" can be irritating. I ended up having to prepare the meal and do all of the dishes along with another person while the middle schoolers were on their phones the whole time.

Here's the specific story: I was done chopping vegetables for the salad and was on my way to go wash my hands when one of their parents saw me and told me to THEIR work FOR them because "they already did too much and were tired." And yes, they ordered me to do it instead of using a "whimperative" and asking out of politeness! The funny thing is that we started cooking about 30 minutes ago and the kids were only there for 15 minutes because they came late and they were already fussing about having to do too much work. As you can probably tell, I was VERY irritated. I didn't complain, though. I politely put a smile on my face and simply did what the asked me to do. After all, I had to respect them since I was in a "subordinate relationship" and also because I wasn't interested in causing a scene. 

As Pinker explains in his piece, words do not mean what they mean and just like words, actions don't mean what they mean. Actions are "a window into human nature, but it is also a fistula, an open wound through which we're exposed to an infectious world."In our daily lives, we act one way when we think otherwise, like the way I did today while I was volunteering.