Beneath the Dust

The Hotpot | January 2025 | By Lisanne

24.10

I recently heard a young couple arguing at the bus stop.

Loud, and angry. The spark was a vacuum cleaner.

The blinking light had been on for a while.

The bag was full.                                                                                                He kept using it anyway.                                                                                   The girl with the raised voice just couldn’t believe it.

I was rather intrigued by how a moment of avoidance can escalate into a public altercation with a crowd of strangers waiting for the same bus.

It’s fascinating how tension can spread.

How something as trivial as an argument over a vacuum cleaner can start in the living room and end up on the sidewalk, where it reaches the ears of people who were just checking the time.

It suddenly dawned on me how rarely we argue about the things we argue about.

It sounded like an argument about dust and chores.

But maybe they were arguing about what lurked beneath the surface:

the missed signals,
the little hiccups,
the things each hoped the other would notice without having to say them out loud.

How many of us have been in a similar position before —

When the vacuum cleaner suddenly became the most important thing in the world,

and all we really wanted wasn’t a clean floor but a listening ear?

I guess what stayed with me is how easy it is for the superficial things to carry the weight of the deeper ones,

And how, when we don’t name what matters,
it finds a way to announce itself anyway—
sometimes to a sidewalk full of strangers.

Thank you for reading! The journal prompt of today:

What tiny misunderstanding could become a moment of connection instead?

Let me know in the comments.

Curious to see more reflections like this? Click through to see the rest of the series on emotional competency. I’d love to hear what resonates with you.