Today I chaired a meeting; it went well enough, as several of the meetings I've chaired over the past year.
The interesting bits, though – and it's not the first time I've noticed them, but they seemed exceptionally present today – were the moments when I had a relatively smooth, helpful, mature relationship with everyone in the room; a joke would be made, and my hearty laughter (I am unavoidably loud, but there you are) rang out with a friendliness, a supportiveness, that helped put people at their ease. And, despite the moments of disagreement and the endless frictions of a colonial working with Brits, the general tone was pleasantly professional, and people went away feeling as though they had been heard and contributed. It felt almost as though I was channelling my father, or my late senior colleague Philip B–....
What's odd about it all: I could see, in the interstices in the two hours of meeting, fleeting glimpses of the person I might have been had things gone differently in my life – someone less damaged by inchoate rage and resentment, less uncertain, less bitter about what the world had done to him. A Sagittarius without the vein of Scorpio running through him: someone not quite so insistent on facing other people with their own flaws, less accusing, less cruel. Not because I would particularly want, even in an alternative universe, to chair meetings: but merely that such moments of authority, of relationship, might be so easy that they would become unimportant, minor chores in a life, a career, where I was an easy and supportive authority for others, rather than a somewhat bitter semi-failure often on the sidelines, and one so often unable to communicate without aggression or defensiveness.
You could even imagine me, lighter and more confident, and of course healthier, than all the people I have actually ended up being – able not merely to chair such a meeting, but to do so with grace and kindness, with the skill that moves groups of people forward and enables all their productive ideas to function:
what I might have been, if everything had gone differently....
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