In movies, you can immediately recognize it. It happens when the girlfriend has all of her bags packed and she’s just about out the door as the boyfriend comes in. It happens when the employee has had an unbelievably bad sequence of events of which none were his fault and his boss blows up and tells him he’s fired. It happens when the little boy loses his parents in a car accident and only the uncle is there to comfort him.
The perfect thing.
The characters playing opposite them will suddenly come up with the most incredible speech that brings a tear to the audience’s eye and gets them the girl, the job back, the respect and love, and sometimes the applause of all those who heard it.
Do they find what to say in their hearts? Does it just flow out in such organized and poetic fashion? No. It was written by a writer, then several screenwriters, then changed slightly by the director, partially ad-libbed by the actor, and reassembled by the editor.
It took approximately two dozen people and several years of writing for that person to say the perfect thing in that moment that made everything in their life better.
What this does is make for a nice movie. What it also does, is plague all of us with the sense that we are idiots when we don’t say that perfect thing. We play and replay situations over and over and tell our friends long after about what we “should have” said. By then it’s too late. The girl is gone, the job is lost, and nobody applauded.
So what to do? When someone looks at you with an expression that you do not want to see, with anger, confusion, desperation….what do you do?
You stop.
There is no audience, there is no established time that the next words must be uttered in.
You stop and think. It may be that the perfect thing is just to hold someone when they are upset. It may be that you ask if you can talk about this later, when you have had time to think and when emotions are not running so high. It may be to just tell the truth.
Whatever it is, and whatever you do, you cannot hold on to the regret and guilt that you may feel for not doing it exactly right. If you do get it right, you were very lucky. If you don’t, more than likely, you were just human.
