What we leave behind in coffee shops……
Just a few days ago, a friend at my workplace invited me to join her to watch a coffee shop play. We were the first one’s to arrive and took the chance to walk around and chat, without any stress about being ‘on time’. I dislike the way anxiety about time can rule our lives, making it difficult to be present for anything and this leisurely evening felt right in my bones.
Life in the slow lane is always on time. I love making time for time and tend to grab the opportunity to chat whenever I can with people who bob their head out from the kingdom of never enough.
So, for me this new unique idea of an immersive play in a coffee shop was just what was needed. Coffee, cookies and the opportunity to be a fly on the wall in other people’s dramatic lives without risking rejection or embarrassment in our own; That’s the point of theatre, it dares to show us how we feel, without embarrassing us or forcing us to take accountability.
I didn’t know that Kafka’s coffee shop had moved to Great Northern Way. The writer by the same name has left an indelible mark on my soul in my teen years. He wrote about deep rejection in a society that has the attention span of a fly. People think of him as dark, morbid, sad, highly complex and deeply wounded. For me he is a demi-god who shone the light on our deepest wounds. He wrote in the pronoun of” I” but took on the burden of our complexes on himself, the fall guy, a scapegoat for a cruel and narcissistic world. His contribution to literature is under-rated I believe, even though he is acknowledged as a genius.
I think the play gained by being in that coffee shop rather than any other coffee shop. I don’t think I’d have related the same way if it was staged in a coffee shop called, ‘Great Northern Way Coffee”. It would have felt awkward like technology, not seamlessly human like Kafka.
The play was triggering on so many levels, because of the physical proximity to the actors as well as the nature of conversations. I think I am forever changed in taking coffee shops for granted as neutral spaces in the same genre as washrooms and waiting rooms in departure lounges. The Great Northern Way campuses shine with human-ness and connection. That’s quite a change in thinking over the last couple of decades, where humans idolized technology and denigrated humanness.
The play honed in to me that what we leave behind in coffee shops is so much more than used cups of coffee and crumbs. We leave behind our anxieties, our complexes, our rage, our lust, that which we hide in the rest of our lives. I found myself feeling deep compassion for the silent staff member who would keep cleaning the tables after the characters left with a martyred expression, a silent witness to our vulnerabilities. Talk about holding space. The play gave me this eerie feeling that my mask didn’t actually work. It showed me the futility of hiding our greatest wounds because strangers could see easily what we don’t acknowledge to ourselves.
There were seven stories in the play, but I found myself repeatedly watching one story again because of the intensity of the story and the acting. Father’s Day showed the dilemmas of estranged families who struggle with their core relationship wound of rejection. Family is about relationships with limited choice. We can choose our coffee but we can’t choose our parents, siblings or children. The Universe chooses for us, and our job is respond to these events as if there was a choice, as if we willingly choose to love our parents and siblings, that it isn’t in fact thrust on us. Perhaps we will be judged one day by a kind god who sees that we lifted our cross with graceful martyrdom or perhaps we will be celebrated for standing up to those for whom we didn’t matter when it mattered the most. This little vignette left a pregnant silence at the end, dramatic yet mundane as it was staged in a coffee shop.
The flies on the wall grieved alongside father and son, witnessing the pain as it flowed out of the son’s face unable to find comfort in the parent’s embrace.
Where do unshed tears fall? They stick on concrete walls, plastic coffee cups and disconnected text messages. Ah we grieve, we grieve over that which we could not control, but silently.
Gazing into the coffee grounds at the bottle of my cup this experience made me bold. Bold enough to talk. Bold enough to write and share.
Behind The Veil 