Filter Coffee #102
On Waiting For The Other Shoe To Drop
Dear Readers,
I felt deeply honoured and encouraged to receive welcome notes and very insightful comments from many of you. It is just and appropriate that I share some of those comments:
Tarun Kunzru says: “Roots provide that spiritual, cultural and emotional anchor. Lucky are those who cherish the love and affection of grandparents and great grandparents.”
Shahji says: “I have tried to get my grandchildren interested in their roots and ancestry but they seem to be least interested. By the time they realise that they should have known more about their ancestors their ancestry would have become untraceable.”
Amba Prasad says: “My mother’s parents too are just names. We, the cousins, have embarked on a mission to trace our roots and have traced 5 generations. I sincerely hope that GenNext will value the importance of staying connected to GenPast.”
Jayashree Kumar says: “Except for my mother no one talked about my ancestors. I talk to my grandchildren about my husband’s ancestors and talk to them about my family house in Chennai which is 100 years old and how we lived as one big joint family.”
S G Murali recounts: “My children grew up under the care of my mother who told them stories as she fed them. In the process they got good nourishment not only for the body but also their mind. All that has had a significant influence on my children becoming responsible and respectful.”
Friends, it does not matter when and where you start. Please make your children create a family tree and trace the ancestry as far as one can discover. There are web tools available.
You can start with this one. I have given this link to my teenage granddaughter and I am hoping she will take a crack at it.
👟 Waiting for The Other Shoe to Drop
In the early 20th century, in New York City, bedrooms were built one on top of another, and this idiom is said to have taken birth from the story of a landlord and tenant. It is said that the tenant of the upper floor, a bachelor, kept late nights and used to come home and take his shoes off and drop them with a thud loud enough to wake up the landlord, a light sleeper, who lived in the bedroom below. Each time this happened, the landlord would stomp up the stairs and yell at the tenant for waking him up.
Apparently one night the tenant came in late as usual, took off his right shoe and dropped it with a thud, but remembered immediately the tongue lashing he got from the landlord and gently placed the left shoe on the floor. The landlord who had been by now roused from his sleep by the first thud waited for some time to hear the second thud and when that did not happen for some time, he went up and knocked on the tenant’s door who, by now half asleep, opened the door to see who was at the door and even before the tenant could utter a word, the landlord screams, “For heaven’s sake drop the other shoe, I want to sleep!”
The import of this idiom is ‘to await a seemingly inevitable event’. It is also relatable to anticipation of unfavourable situations. Imagine someone moving into the flat next door. You gear up to hearing all kinds of noise. Furniture being dragged, hammering of nails, drilling and so on. Your hope of noiseless existence is shattered by all kinds of noise that were not entirely unanticipated. In fact, even before the noise begins, you experience a sense of apprehension and anxiety.
Similar is the case when the kids on the upper floor return from school and you brace yourself for the noise of their running about and screaming. You are clearly waiting for the other shoe to drop. Symbolically, the first shoe being the kids coming home.
The ‘other shoe’ has become associated with a sense of foreboding, anticipation of something bad happening, or anxiety over what’s in store.
In life, we experience many good and bad things, leaving us with pleasant and unpleasant feelings, as the case may be. We find asking ourselves “What do we do?” or “What next?”
This is the shoe that hasn’t dropped yet, but we know it would, eventually. A real life example is one of attrition or retrenchment. In either case, the likelihood, as the case may be, of losing people or losing one’s job is so imminent that you are gearing yourself to hear the shoe drop. Not just waiting for that to happen, but to take certain actions that might help mitigate the after effects of the other shoe dropping.
Identifying the ‘other shoe’ and its drop effects helps you to take pre-emptive actions to stay on course. If you miss the bus, it does not mean you will miss the train. The moment the possibility of missing the bus looms large, you decide not to chase that option but change course and head to the railway station.
I saw a news item about Delta Airlines offering domestic passengers on an overbooked flight $10,000 (wow!) to give up their seats, before the ‘shoe dropped’ - namely passengers being chaotically offloaded. A clear attempt at damage control.
A manager of an establishment witnessing a heated exchange between a customer and an employee steps in to mollify the customer, sensing that it is attracting the attention of other customers and is vitiating the atmosphere. The customer may have been at fault, and he may have treated the employee disrespectfully, but the manager realises that the shoe will surely drop and escalate tensions if he sided with the employee and joined issue with the irate customer.
Should discretion be a better part of valour in all confrontations? Would it be seen as an effort at avoiding the shoe drop, or will it be seen as meek submission with collateral consequences? If you are travelling by car and a road rage kind of situation occurs, do you opt for a full-scale confrontation or avoid it by tactfully withdrawing? Your action is most likely to be influenced by your quick assessment of the effect of that shoe drop.
Our lives are unpredictable in a true sense. We relax, feeling content that everything is going well and there’s no fear of a shoe dropping. But a sudden death in the family, infidelity of a spouse, a kid gone wayward, someone dear to you diagnosed with cancer most unexpectedly, or one’s business taking a nosedive, can turn life upside down. Reality lies in the fact that a shoe drop was never anticipated, and when that happens quietly without any forewarning, we realise that life can never be on an even keel forever. On the contrary, life alternates between happiness and pain or misery and unless there’s a certain amount of equanimity, events that alter the way we live can be all consuming and overpowering.
Living life fully each day without worrying about the other shoe dropping helps all of us to become Stoic, and when that shoe drops, we will not be overwhelmed but will have the mental preparedness to deal with the consequences dispassionately and with a pinch of fatalism.
There are life altering and game-changing events. These create a lot of anxiety as to what is in store. As a young lawyer practising in Mysore, I had to give up practice and take up a full-time job in Mumbai. This paradigm shift created a lot of anxiety in my mind as I had to not only contend with giving up law practice but also get used to the hustle-and-bustle of Mumbai life. I was unsure of myself and the decision that I took. A part of me wanted to rush back to Mysore and resume law practice, fearing when the shoe would drop and what it would do to me. The other part of me chided me and asked me to have confidence in myself and in my ability to tide over the nervous apprehension - which I did, and the rest is history.
Dear Readers, to understand what ways you might deal with the situation when the shoe drops, please go back in time and ask yourself - How many times have I encountered dropped shoes? How did I deal with them? Has that given me the courage and conviction I can handle dropped shoes?
Regardless of the number of dropped shoes that you may have handled, you have to reconcile to the fact that there will be many more such dropped shoes. Your experience of dealing with them should make you shed apprehensions and reconcile to the fact that the shoe will drop some time or the other and brace yourself to deal with it.
Let me end this on a lighter vein. Oh! This may be the other shoe that you were fearing!
What kind of shoes do bakers wear?
Loafers!
A couple having the same shoe size are sole mates.
Quote attributed to Marilyn Monroe:
“If I ever let my head down, it will be to admire my shoes.”
See you next week, friends. Until then, take good care of yourself and be safe. Ciao.
Quite hilarious Prabha. Thanks for sharing this unique experience.
I specifically remember the part of Americans being so irked about sound that they would be the first to complain if our kids ( in my case, grandkids) were to run around the house, particularly as most houses and smaller apartments ( in the US) had wooden floors. I still do ask my grandkids not to run around in India and make noise (though most if not all floors here are of concrete) that I fear the midnight knock from the folks downstairs as the impending and inevitable event and that could follow. I had not heard of this idiom before, so thanks for adding to my weak knowledge.
I liked the part about the other shoes that your readers could be fearing about. Good one there. Reading your mention of the quote of Marilyn Monroe on looking down to admire her shoes. I could not help but remember an old friend of mine, who had this nerve against meeting others. He once told me to invest heavily in a good pair of shoe, - in the hope that others would be so taken up by the shoe that they may forget to look up and see your face.