Too little
Turn it into content
That spill will make a perfect clip.
A minor mishap becomes a lasting public performance without the person’s choice.
Discretion
Let a stranger’s private moment remain their own.
Careful judgment about what is appropriate to disclose.
Discretion is judgment about what is appropriate to disclose. City life often gives you accidental access to another person’s embarrassment, conversation or difficulty. Access brings a choice about what to do with it. You can let a passing glimpse stay small, speak privately when useful, and leave a stranger’s ordinary mishap out of the story you send to everyone else.
Discretion gives privacy amid ordinary visibility
At the café, a stranger’s cup tips and a small lake reaches a napkin that was clearly not designed for maritime service. Your phone is already in your hand. You put it face down and slide the napkin holder within reach. The incident can remain a spilled drink instead of acquiring an audience, a caption and a life beyond the table.
Finding the balance in Discretion
Put away the camera during a stranger’s minor café mishap.
A fitting response
Keep the audience small
I will put the phone down and pass the napkins.
The practical response helps the moment end at the table.
Pursued too far
Treat all speaking as betrayal
I cannot quietly tell the staff the floor needs drying.
A useful, limited report is confused with exposing the person.
The audience and purpose matter as much as the fact itself. A quiet practical message can protect what a public retelling would expose.
What Discretion makes possible
A person can recover from an awkward moment more easily when everyone nearby does not become its distributor. Discretion protects the unremarkable freedom to be imperfect in public. It also changes your own attention: you can respond to the scene in front of you without converting it into material for a distant audience.
Discretion in ordinary life
An overheard call
Leave an identifiable detail out of the amusing story you tell later.
A lost item
Give a found envelope to the venue’s appropriate lost-property point without reading its contents for interest.
Nearby virtues, different work
Compassion
Compassion responds to distress; Discretion judges what should remain undisclosed, even when no distress is visible.
Courtesy
Courtesy can make a brief encounter easier. Discretion protects the information that encounter happens to reveal.
Discretion and its counterfeits
Anonymous in name only
Removing a name while retaining identifying details counterfeits Discretion. Consider who could recognize the person.
Silence as an absolute
Refusing every appropriate report can counterfeit Discretion when information is needed to address an actual problem. Share what is necessary with the proper recipient.
How to cultivate Discretion
Notice when access was accidental rather than invited.
Consider identification through context as well as names.
Separate a useful private report from public circulation.
Try it today
Before sharing an anecdote from a public place, check whether someone else’s identifiable private detail supplies its entertainment. Choose another story if it does.
Questions worth returning to
- Who benefits from this disclosure?
- Did the person choose this audience?
Quotations and further reading
Seven selections to return to through the week. Follow a source link to read the surrounding passage.
No one would put his ear to a keyhole if he thought an eye might be at the keyhole behind him watching him in the act.
A. G. Gardiner · Windfalls · On Keyhole Morals
In “On Keyhole Morals,” Gardiner tests the difference between public manners and private conduct. The comic second keyhole exposes the person who respects privacy only when being watched.
While you are shaking hands please take notice—cautiously—of their attire. Yes, cautiously; for they are as quick to resent a stare as a lady in a box at the horse show is.
O. Henry · The Trimmed Lamp, and Other Stories of the Four Million · The Trimmed Lamp
Introducing two working women, O. Henry turns his warning toward the “Meddlesome Reader.” A person’s work or modest clothing gives an observer no greater claim to stare. The same courtesy belongs to the stranger behind the spilled cup.
There are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told.
Edgar Allan Poe · The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Volume 5 · The Man of the Crowd
Poe opens a tale about a narrator who becomes absorbed in following a stranger. Its language of unreadable secrets unsettles the observer’s confidence: visibility does not mean another person’s life is available to interpretation or disclosure.
I shall be fortunate if gossip does not make me the most disreputable person in the whole affair.
George Eliot · Middlemarch · Chapter LXXIX
Will Ladislaw says this after hearing that his name has become entangled in public disclosures. Eliot shows gossip adding a new burden to facts already painful enough.
However necessary publicity is for securing reformed administration, however useful such exposures may be for political purposes, the whole is attended by such a waste of the most precious human emotions, by such a tearing of living tissue, that it can scarcely be endured.
Jane Addams · Twenty Years at Hull-House · Problems of Poverty
Addams recalls families distressed by reports about a public institution. She recognizes both the need to expose wrongdoing and the human cost of sensational publicity. Discretion asks what disclosure serves and who bears its consequences.
It will be in vain to follow; for I shall learn no more of him, nor of his deeds.
Edgar Allan Poe · The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Volume 5 · The Man of the Crowd
The pursuing narrator finally admits he will learn no more, even while making an unsupported judgment about the stranger. Poe gives the reader a reason to question the pursuit itself. Curiosity has not earned access to this person’s private life.
Imagine a world in which nobody had any secrets from anybody—could have no secrets from anybody.
A. G. Gardiner · Pebbles on the Shore · On Talking to One’s Self
Gardiner’s thought experiment imagines the exposure of deception and ends with his own embarrassed blush. It supplies a question rather than a rule: what would be lost if every passing thought and private circumstance became audible?
Continue through the catalog
Practice this collection
Choose this approved collection as an optional workbook program, or select individual virtues in My Virtues.