When Next We Meet (Part Two)
If all goes well when next we meet will be tomorrow, here.
But under what terms will we meet then? How shall we meet today?
Yesterday . . .
. . . I wrote about a beautiful meeting and a sad one because both were brought to my attention at roughly the same time and because I wanted to talk about meeting as a kind of tool.
Though I did not mention it yesterday, I likely spend too much time thinking about the control board of everything, a panel of levers and knobs and switches which, if it existed somewhere other than my imagination, would be where we might turn a few dials and push the right buttons to make a better world.
Dial-up bikes and dial down cars, for instance. More fresh food, less pre-packaged food. That sort of thing.
Or, as I tried to argue for yesterday, dial up better meetings because how we met pre-Covid surely included sickness, lacked humanity.
Today I am thinking of a meeting—at work, in class, between you and me on this page—as a vessel of what we share, or might share, together.
Does not every meeting of every kind—at work, in class, between you and me—signal what we are paying attention to? Or wish to attend to?
Another meeting in which we fail to not discuss what we wish to avoid? Where money and shame and screens crowd out the rest? A place where a puffed-up agenda or overwrought syllabi or device helps us hide from each other and from ourselves?
Try this:
Is this meeting about what we need to get done? And is that worth doing?
Does it play with an idea we might honor?
Can it be how beauty gets to be put at the center of things?
“Getting it right” and and “efficiency” and “best practices” are dialed up on the control board of everything as high as they can go, to eleven. You can feel that stress all about.
What if we dialed those down just enough to meet each other and the world anew?