Handling Your Business

Chapter 5

This post is a chapter of the book It Ain’t Gonna Lick Itself: Creating and Maintaining Living Spaces That Make Your Life Better (In Spite Of Everything) by Hanne Blank Boyd.

Click here for the full table of contents.

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Illustration by Elizabeth M. Tamny

I am a southerner by choice. It wasn’t something I planned on, having been raised in the altogether different environment of the Great Lakes region of the United States, but what with one thing and another I first ended up in the South and then discovered I liked it.

One of the things I like about the South is the way Southerners use language. I don’t mean the accents, either, and I do use the plural on purpose: just like Rhode Islanders don’t sound like Minnesotans, folks from the Outer Banks don’t sound like they’re from Mobile. What I mean by the way Southerners use language is the distinctive turns of phrase, the shorthand, the locutions and circumlocutions that seem to percolate through the ground water in this part of the world.

I enjoy the meaningful shadings of phrases like “might could,” which is distinct from either “might” or “could” in isolation. If I tell you that Jeannie might could kick that no-good sumbitch’s ass to the curb, it tells you not only that the potential exists but that the potential is primed to become an actuality at any moment.

Similarly, there is a lot of bang for the buck to be had in the many permutations of “y’all,” which as a pronoun that is simultaneously singular, plural, and gender-neutral quite honestly proves beyond a shadow of any doubt that an awful lot of people will go out of their way to tie their shoelaces together just to prove they can fall down, since a whole lot of folks’ve been out here using that polymorphous genderless freewheeler of a pronoun just fine all their lives without even thinking it was weird.¹

Take the “y’all means all” pledge at the Southern Poverty Law Center.

It was love at first hearing the day I encountered the Southern phrase “handling your business.” On the page it seems innocuous enough, I suppose. Out of context it’s dry, formal, perhaps even actuarial. But business, in this phrase, isn’t the kind of business where you get an MBA. It could have something to do with making money, sure, but only because making sure your finances are in order is an aspect of handling your business. Handling your business means all your business: handling whatever needs to be handled in your life, to the best of your ability.

In the mouth of a born and bred southerner like my spouse, “handling your business” can be the highest of praise. A competent person, one who is trustworthy and reliable, on whom you can absolutely count to get things done on time and who isn’t going to shirk a needed duty or hide from an unpleasant truth, is someone of whom you say, with a tight, approving nod, “now her, she handles her business.”

I mean, just thinking about that sentence just now sent me flying off to do a small but important bit of online financial management in the middle of writing a paragraph, because taking the time to go handle a meaningful errand rather than putting it off is one of the core principles of handling your business.

(I’m as flawed as the next person, Heaven knows. Probably more so. But I try to practice what I preach.)

Someone who doesn’t handle their business? Well, sometimes we all try and fail. Sometimes we need to try a bunch. Sometimes we have to take it in baby steps. Sometimes we need help, by which I mean sometimes I need help. Sometimes I need lots of help, in fact.

That’s all okay, believe it or not.