‘Défense d’afficher.  Do not advertise.  And yet there she is.  Elle s’affiche.  She shows herself.  She shows up against the city.’*

Others might do that but we don’t.

We’re different, better, special.

At least, this is the story we tell ourselves.

It’s 1929 and a woman stops to light a cigarette in front of  a notice saying “do not advertise.”  Photographer Marianne Breslauer captures this moment.  I reflect, when we simply do what we must do others may notice.

Edgar Schein writes about the importance of helping to what it is to be human:

‘Helping is, therefore, both a routine process of exchange that is the basis of all social behaviour and a special process that sometimes interrupts the normal flow and must be handled with particular sensitivity.’**

We are not different.  We are everyone, and there’s a way of expressing ourselves within this reality that generally and specifically makes the world a little better.

“What do you want to bring into being [hiddenly]?”^

(*From Lauren Belkin’s Flaneuse.)
(**From Edgar Schein’s Helping.)
(From U.Lab – hiddenly added by me.)