Most situations in life include handy instruction manuals; but not every situation does. Navigating the wilds of the Richmond IKEA store today, I wished that there was such a manual for first-time IKEA users. Now, my parents took me to IKEA when I was a child, but I can't say I paid terribly much attention to the procedure you had to follow. I remembered certain details - the shape and layout of the check-out area was vividly implanted in my memory; the smell of the Danish pastries available in the cafeteria will never leave me. But basic details such as "how to buy a bed" seemed to have escaped me. Everyone else knew what to do. Everyone else knew how to take down the details of the furniture they wanted to buy, which direction to walk in, where to pick up their actual furniture (because obviously you don't just take the bed that you like and walk out of the store with it). There's clear protocol, and everyone in the store seemed to know what it was, except for me. I felt like I had failed IKEA 101. Well, not failed as such, since I still succeeded in buying a bed, mattress and desk, but not without some embarrassment, and large amounts of confusion.
It makes me wonder if everyone else really understands IKEA, or if they are just good actors, because they too don't want to carry the shame of being IKEA virgins. There was certainly no-one there doing a "500 Days of Summer" routine, which seems the other option to managing the stress of IKEA - run with the chaos; confuse everyone else. No, everyone else was sedate. They seemed to enjoy it. But did they really?
But then my thoughts became a bit deeper, partly to justify my frustration at not understanding IKEA, partly because that's the way my mind works, and I moved into more philosophical territory: what about more important situations, where people need to know how to do something but no-one feels the need to explain it to them? Life, when you think about it, is full of these kinds of situations. I once had a segment in my Friday afternoon Year 12 Lit classes called "I know it's a stupid question, but...", based on the assumption that, if one of us has a "stupid" question we are too embarrassed to ask, at least a handful of other people will be wanting to ask just the same question, and will benefit from hearing the answer. The assumption proved correct. In life, we assume lots of basic knowledge which is not fair to assume. Everyone benefits from having the basics revisited, whether for purposes of reminder or to hear them properly for the first time.
Which made me think of a very moving part of a generally very moving letter - Paul's letter to the early church in Rome, when he asks them this series of questions: "How...can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them? And how can they preach unless they are sent? As it is written, 'How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!'" Paul wasn't writing about IKEA, of course, or anything like it. He was writing about the much bigger problem, of how to fix our broken human nature. Is there an instruction manual available for this job? There is, actually, but most of the time people don't know where to look for it. They're like me, wandering helplessly around IKEA, looking for instructions and not finding them.
I didn't notice any particularly beautiful feet today. I did notice that the people I asked for instructions had fairly grumpy faces, as if it should all have been obvious. I would have appreciated a few beautiful smiles. That would have been a good substitute for beautiful feet.
It makes me not want to go to IKEA again. But it does make me want to spend more of my life helping to answer the simple questions that everyone's too embarrassed to ask.
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