The Path Does Not Lead Towards Me

Not because it was especially clever. More because it seemed to arrive already finished.

Something had gone wrong, and I happened to be standing closest to it.

Not literally.

But close enough that I was the easiest place for the search to begin.

The questions started circling.

Did you forget?

Did you make a mistake?

Are you sure?

Maybe you…

One possibility would be ruled out, only for another version of the same suspicion to take its place.

What interested me was that the search did not seem to widen very much.

There were other possibilities, of course, but they lived a little farther away and required a bit more digging. A little more brain horsepower.

Blame, like water, seems quite happy to take the easiest available path.

And I happened to be standing at the bottom of the hill.

Eventually I said:

“I get that you’re looking for a pathway to place the blame, but that path does not lead towards me.”

I liked it more afterwards than I did when I said it.

Not because it won anything.

Because it refused the invitation to argue.

There are conversations where defending yourself only seems to give the accusation more oxygen.

You knock one thing down and another one pops up.

You explain why it could not have happened that way and suddenly the question becomes, well, what about this other way?

At some point you realize you are no longer discussing what actually happened.

You are participating in someone else’s search for a culprit.

So perhaps the better response is not always a better defence.

Sometimes it is simply to name the direction of travel.

That path does not lead towards me.

In defence of my accuser, I did briefly have to check whether Occam’s razor should be taken into account.

Perhaps the simplest explanation really was that I had caused the problem.

But that did not seem to be what was happening.

The path towards me was not the simplest explanation.

It was simply the shortest route to a conclusion.

Maybe this is one of the things that changes with age.

Or perhaps it is not age at all.

Perhaps it is efficiency.

Less energy spent proving.

More energy spent noticing.

I have become more interested in saying the thing that makes someone stop for half a second.

Not the blunt thing.

The blunt thing is easy.

The thing that arrives sideways.

The thing that makes sense only after it has already landed.

I thought of another one recently after someone told me that something I was planning to do would be embarrassing.

I did not say it aloud, which is probably evidence of some small progress.

But what occurred to me was:

“Make sure, if you attend my funeral, to remind people of this moment.”

I liked that one too.

Not because it is particularly vicious.

Because it quietly asks a question of scale.

How important is this, really?

Not how important does it feel now.

Not how loudly is somebody reacting to it.

How important is it when measured against a life?

In fifty years, who will remember?

In twenty-five?

For that matter, how much of what feels enormous to us now will survive next Thursday?

There is something useful in shrinking things back to their actual size.

Humour is good at that.

Good humour, anyway.

Not cruelty dressed up as wit.

The kind that gives both people somewhere to go.

I have always liked the sort of verbal sparring where somebody says something sharp enough to sting, the other person sends something sharper back, and both of them end up laughing.

Nobody has to pretend they were not hit.

Nobody has to pretend they did not enjoy the shot.

Some cultures seem more comfortable with this than others.

Back home, people can be merciless with each other and somehow affectionate at the same time.

You learn pretty quickly that every weakness will eventually be discovered and converted into material.

Being late.

Getting something wrong.

Taking yourself too seriously.

All fair game.

In the right setting, that is not hostility.

It is closer to the opposite.

It says:

You are one of us, therefore you are not exempt.

I used to work in environments where this kind of thing was part of the machinery.

Long days.

Changing plans.

Weather.

People waiting on other people.

People discovering that the carefully prepared schedule had lasted about twelve minutes.

Tension had to go somewhere.

Sometimes it escaped as swearing.

Sometimes as sarcasm.

Sometimes as relentless needling.

Better a joke about somebody taking too long than an actual argument about somebody taking too long.

It was a pressure valve.

I remember being new in one of those environments and being made very aware of it.

I was working sound, and there is a particular kind of experienced crew member who treats the audio department as the place delays come from, whether they actually do or not.

Every hesitation became public theatre.

“Waiting on sound, everybody.”

“Waiting on sound.”

It went on for days.

Partly because I was new.

Partly because I was slower.

And partly because I was an easy target.

There was also a fairly obvious sense that picture was the real work and sound was something trailing behind it, necessary perhaps, but not quite belonging to the important end of the food chain.

There was a long drive between jobs not long after.

Enough road for either a very uncomfortable silence or an actual conversation.

I chose the conversation.

I told him people in his position sometimes seemed to develop a slightly inflated sense of their place in the universe.

Then I offered what seemed to me a useful correction.

Take the pictures away and you have radio.

Take the sound away and you have PowerPoint.

The public commentary stopped.

Not because the line was devastating.

It wasn’t.

I think it was because I had finally stopped behaving like somebody who needed permission to be there.

People under pressure often respect that.

They also seem to respect something else, which took me longer to understand.

Owning your mistakes.

If you get something wrong and everybody knows you got it wrong, most of the time they are not looking for your humiliation.

They just want you to acknowledge it.

Yep.

That was me.

I missed it.

My mistake.

It is remarkable how quickly a room can settle once somebody says that.

The opposite is also true.

Nothing inflates a small mistake quite like somebody desperately trying to prove it was not theirs.

Suddenly everyone is interested.

Now we have a mystery.

Now everyone is a detective.

Which is probably part of why false hubris irritates me as much as it does.

Not confidence.

I like confidence.

Confidence is useful.

False hubris is something else.

The person who must appear to know.

The person who cannot be questioned.

The person whose certainty seems to leave no room for the possibility that they might be unsure.

I find that difficult to be around.

Partly because it is boring.

But mostly because it shuts things down.

Anything genuinely creative seems to require periods of looking ridiculous.

You have to try things badly.

You have to misunderstand things.

You have to ask questions that expose what you do not know.

You have to build something ugly before you know how to build it properly.

There has to be room for clumsiness.

That becomes more important once you are responsible for other people.

You want them confident enough to act.

Loose enough to experiment.

Secure enough to be corrected.

And honest enough to admit when they got it wrong.

The difficulty is that the work still has to be good.

There is always a finished thing at the end.

A deadline.

A client.

An audience.

Something that has to work.

So leadership, at least in that kind of environment, seems to involve holding two things at once.

You have to allow people the freedom to be uncertain.

And you cannot allow uncertainty to become an excuse.

Too much pressure and people hide.

Too little and standards disappear.

Somewhere in the middle, if you get it right often enough, people learn how to be both capable and unfinished.

Perhaps that is where all of this has been heading.

Back to the question of scale.

How much force does this actually deserve?

The pathway line.

The funeral line.

The cameraman.

Occam’s razor, briefly called as a witness for the prosecution.

Owning the mistake.

Letting people experiment.

They all seem to involve some version of the same thing.

Not every criticism requires a defence.

Not every embarrassment deserves shame.

Not every mistake needs a culprit.

Not every sharp word is an attack.

Not every confident person knows.

And not every moment that feels enormous deserves to keep all the energy it is demanding.

Perhaps that is the thing I am learning.

Not how to avoid force.

Not how to become passive.

Just how to use less of it.

Exactly enough.

And no more.