Can a Ham Sandwich Bring World Peace?
During one phase of my journey, I was the proud owner of a Vermont General Store, in a tiny town in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. Because I learned so much from this amazing experience, this will probably be the first of many stories about my life as a store owner, but this one stands out today because every time I watch people launching social media wars over the Great Trump Divide, I’m reminded of one of my biggest lessons from those fruitful years.
As “The Guy From California Who Bought The General Store,” which was how the local papers and many customers dubbed me, I’d gotten plenty of questions from people wondering what I was up to. In answering, I alway kept things simple, but the deeper story was that after decades of working in complex organizations and living big city life in Los Angeles, I was ready to experience life as close to the land and the roots of community as possible. I had also reached a point where I felt that living a simpler life, which allowed me to stay heart-centered and more focused on my mindfulness practice throughout the day, was the next step in my evolution.
Being the owner of a General Store with a post office that has continuously served a rural farming community for 150 years was my dream come true. The joy came from being able to connect face to face over the counter with the good folk who called this town home, many from families dating back five generations or more. Farmers, woodsman, schoolteachers, craftsmen, students, and a long parade of seasonal residents and tourists all came through the doors daily, some a half dozen times or more. Whether it was grabbing coffee and a homemade muffin at 5:00 am after milking the cows, stepping off the tractor to pick up bailing wire and a sandwich at lunchtime, or ending the day with a homemade pizza; if you wanted to skip the drive to town and catch up on the latest news around town, the General Store was your destination of choice.
As part of my mindfulness practice, my personal focus as the store’s proprietor was simply to practice loving every single person I served. For the dozen or so store employees, I translated this into a basic business principle: treat every single person who comes through our door as a genuine friend. To me, unconditional friendship was both a good spiritual principle and sound business practice, but it also seeded a level of social change in town that became surprisingly evident within this close knit community.
As I observed the rhythms of the store I saw that who came in, or not; who customers talked to, or not; and how the staff treated and interacted with various customers was the tip of a massive iceberg with deep undercurrents from the community shaping how people behaved in the store. It was not unusual to see distinct groups of people hanging out in the store or on the porch, with cold shoulders turned between different groups. As I dug into this more, both staff and customers warned that there were seismic tensions between the town’s various social factions, and I’d even been advised to tone down the friendliness mantra a bit, to not rock any boats.
I realized that a call for unconditional friendship to everyone who came through our door was equivalent to radical social change within a complex community culture. Far from being daunted by this, I was even more determined to see how this practice played out.
Imagine my elation when after about a year as the store owner, one of the regulars pulled me aside to share that, in his opinion, something about this store was having a positive impact in town. As a person with strong opinions, he’d had his share of run ins with some of the locals over the years, which in a small town can leave a person pretty isolated. He shared that, for whatever reason, people inside the General Store were always noticeably friendly and welcoming, and in his opinion, this mindset was showing up in how folks were interacting beyond our doors. He didn’t know exactly what we were doing, but he urged us to keep it up!
The fly in the ointment for my California-esque customer service approach was a woman I’ll call Sue, who’d worked at the store for over 25 years, living in town her entire life. Unsurprisingly, with this much history, there were whole swaths of the townsfolk that she’d crossed swords with over the years, and peace in the Middle East was more likely than her having civil conversations with any of her arch-enemies.
While she was OK with the general idea of friendliness and did her part to make most of our customers welcome as she served them over the counter, there were several people, and one in particular, that she absolutely refused to talk to, and would just walk away from the counter to avoid contact with. Where the previous owner had supported her bias, I went out of my way to make these folks welcome in the store but granted her a reluctant reprieve on our friendliness policy so she wouldn’t have to serve this customer, as long as someone else could cover.
After a few years as the store’s owner, I had another notable endorsement of our approach to serving the community. One of the unofficial town fathers, a much-respected forester, stood at the counter of the store, in front of all the staff present--including Sue--and shared a remarkable observation. He said he’d been coming to this store for decades, and in his experience, something about the way folks interacted in the store today had changed. He said that in his experience over the years, the store attracted certain segments of the townsfolk as regular customers, but then opposing segments would choose not to frequent the store so they didn’t have to associate. It had always been an either or situation, but never all together at the same time. But now, for the first time that he could remember everybody from town was comfortable frequenting the store. And to his amazement, people from the various groups were even socializing as they hung out over coffee or while grabbing a meal. He just wanted to let us know that our friendly way of serving folks had shifted something and that he was gratified to witness this refreshing change.
I’ll admit to feeling somehow validated by his statement, and couldn’t help giving Sue a knowing smile at the end of this conversation. However, the universe had something else up its sleeve which was clearly evident when not an hour later Sue’s archenemy walked up to the counter. I fully expected her to march away as she normally did, but to everyone's utter amazement, she took his order for a Ham Sandwich, made the sandwich and then politely handed it to her nemesis. And then she turned around and gave me a huge knowing smile as if to convey that she had gotten the message and was now willing to give peace a try in our little corner of the world.
So my take away was, yes, world peace is possible--one ham sandwich at a time!
What this means to me in our day is that, whether the issue is Trump, or any one of the critical issues we must grapple with together as a global family, even with the people we disagree most vehemently with, there is tremendous power in simply acknowledging our mutual humanity, and making the effort to treat each other with respect and dignity and, yes, unconditional friendship.