Author Archives: Jonathan

S04E19: but soft, what light?

how far i’ve come

Here’s a picture towards Tower Bridge from London Bridge. It was the morning and the sun was moody and shrouded, and her long tongue lapped the water. You can see Tower Bridge silhouetted, but you can’t see me. You can’t see all the people streaming along behind me, gearing themselves up for another day of work. So many muted shades.

Later I took a picture of London Bridge from Tower Bridge in the afternoon. How far I’ve come! How different everything is! The river – that’s not the same river that was here this morning. And these people! I could barely see them this morning and now here they are, clonking me with cameras, smiling pure and brilliant smiles in the diminishing sun.

I’m struck in these two pictures by the sense of distance; the space between these images which is a stretch of the inconstant river and the time is the passage of the sun. Except the sun doesn’t move; or, rather, by our piddling measurements she doesn’t move – she is dancing a gentle pirouette around the centre of our galaxy, but we hardly notice. We’ve moved, but it appears that we are fixed and all else moves.

Is there an ever-fixèd mark, like the man says? I drank in the delight of those around me and enjoyed the simple pleasure of waving to tourists on boats down the Thames; unheard, but seen; that simple connection from human to human that is somehow easier from a distance. Pleasure is pleasure to pursue and pain is ever-loitering: death holds no fear save that pain will be its midwife.

Tomorrow I will be back amongst the muted shades. The sun shall hold her same position and the towers will still loom, but I will be different again, and more the next day, and so will you, and this thing will pass, these feelings will fade; you are an ever changing riot of colour and love and life and amazing, and I am pleased and proud and glad that you are here.

If we must change let us change together.

the difficult conversations

I am enjoying the stretching sensation of having difficult conversations at work.[mfn]Oh yes, this is a work-flavoured weeknote. Let me know when you’re back from your fainting couch[/mfn] I pushed myself into this space with force, and I’m doing my best not to back down. What’s helping me the most is that I keep reminding myself that empathy is a superpower, and even more that pulling rank is just a form of violence. Forcing myself to solve the problem in the slightly more difficult, more human-centric way, is a valuable lesson and one I could do with spending more time learning.

Right now, one of those difficult conversations is pushing someone out of their comfort zone so that they can have a difficult conversation they’ve been shying away from. I don’t blame them for shying away, and I feel slightly awkward about the pushing, but I’m also certain that it is a valuable skill to learn. I’m also hyper-aware that my organisation is a genuinely great place, where people are overwhelmingly kind to each other and everyone’s genuinely doing their best. It creates a reasonably safe space to have these conversations with empathy and honesty.

I’ve found that reflected in my feedback – it’s feedback season again – and I’m catching myself enjoying taking the time to reflect on my colleagues and working out what’s great about them but also what I think they could do differently. It’s weirdly intimate, I think, to get feedback about yourself that you instantly understand but had never considered, and I’m really hopeful that I can offer a little bit of that.

the joy of making

I dropped in to see a friend the other day and saw they were getting one of those pre-prepped meal kits. I was intrigued[mfn]influenced[/mfn] to try it out for myself, and I’m really enjoying it. I pick recipes from a limited choice and they just send me stuff, and it seems to spark something in my brain that says “well, now you gotta make it”. And I do. And it means I’ve got lunch the next day too, because the smallest kit they do is for two people.

But more than the practical “I’ve got food to eat now” is the new-remembered joy of creativity. I’ve been struggling to cook for myself for a little while now, and this gentle nudge has been fantastic for reminding me how much I love the sensation of doing things that aren’t tapping away at a keyboard. The joy of smelling that point where meat starts to brown. The strange stickiness of garlic and the satisfying solidity of a potato.

I found this again when I tended bar for an old school friend. I was once a very good bartender, and finding that flow again is amazing. The numerous different tactile sensations you run through: the hard neck of a bottle; the feeling of it leaving your hand; the barely-noticed calculation that tells you where it’ll land; the burning cold of a well-iced shaker as you race against pain to mix a drink.

I noticed it again when I sat down with two lovely people and drank hot tea at a wooden table. I put my fingertips to smooth china and then to rough wood and we imagined worlds where, among the dark decaying ruins of what we called our civilisation, the crabs seized their chance and made the Great Leap forward[mfn]sideways, surely? Ed.[/mfn]

My point in all this is that I am starting to find joy in the little things again, and I think that’s a sign. It’s the first blackbird you hear at 3am as you hug yourself on the sofa with a cup of coffee.[mfn]because your bastard cat woke you up at 2.45[/mfn] It means the sun is coming soon, and there shall be light and warmth again, and all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

Weeknotes S04E12: An anthology of who I am right now

What got you here won’t get you there.

I sit down in front of a piano and for a frustrating hour try to translate what my eyes are seeing and where my fingers are. I write code for a living, I think, as my fingers pick out Cs and Fs at a snail’s pace. I can touch type. My fingers are good fingers. But suddenly I am a child again, and there is a gulf of space and understanding between my brain and my body.

I’m watching my mentee’s eyes light up as she talks about the code she’s written. It’s sloppy and rough, but it works. It works and she’s excitedly walking me through the challenges she had and how she conquered them. I’m so proud of the work she’s done and yet I feel the need to walk her through how to neaten up the work; explain that part of why it works now is that she has a bunch of knowledge in her head that’s required to decrypt what she’s written. I feel like a misstep here will crush her interest, and I wonder how important it is that it fits my definition of ‘good’ right now. I remember with guilt the code I wrote when I started writing code. It was worse than this. If someone had taught me then how to write good code, I might be a better coder today.

If someone had destroyed my enthusiasm for code then, I wouldn’t be any kind of coder today.

I’m resting my fingers on the keys and being told to make a grip like I’m holding an apple. I’ve got to read the notes out loud. I feel stupid and frustrated and embarrassed and angry, because my self-worth is at least partly tied up with being good at things. I get to the end of the lesson and decide that if I’m going to do this, I’ll need to wait until I can buy my own piano so I can practice every night. It might be rationalisation. I think my teacher thinks it is.

I picked up code because it was a joyful exercise in solving problems. I still write code today. I’m getting better now, but it means unlearning bad habits. Those bad habits were picked up because I rushed to do it because I enjoyed it. The slow process of breaking down and rebuilding a skill, refining it, is easier because I love it.

What got me here, to reflective self-improvement, was love of the thing. It was bloody-mindedness and failing a thousand times and tearing out my hair. What will get me to the next level will be focus, concentration, and teaching. Bloody-mindedness is not enough any more.

I decide not to instruct my mentee more than is necessary. One day she’ll have a mentee to whom she can show this code and explain that what gets you here won’t get you there – but what gets you there might not get you here.

l’appel du vide

For me the feeling takes root in my calves. As I edge close to a precipice a sensation snakes up my legs and nestles, dry and smooth, in my stomach. It is simultaneously revulsion and appeal: it beckons me over the edge even as it mocks me for imagining it. It gets worse the longer I stand there. My fingers clutch at the railing, twitching in sympathetic resonance with the me in another universe who has vaulted cleanly over and even now forms a perfect arrow that points to certain doom.

Apparently my experience isn’t universal. A friend of mine refuses even to step onto my balcony. His knees shiver when he approaches the door, and even after my coaxing and entreating he’ll do no more than rest a foot on the wood. His whole body is whip-tense, ready to pull back from the edge if it collapses. Not a meter ahead is another friend, who’s sitting on the railing and smoking a cigarette. His posture is perfect. His head is balanced on his spine which traces a curve to his buttocks, and he sits still and composed with one hand resting on his thigh and his bare brown feet glowing in the morning’s light. Smoke curls from his lips; a louche Buddha. He’s completely beautiful. I admire the way he doesn’t hear the call. I wonder if my other friend, white-knuckled and clinging to the frame, hears it too.

I’m still being interviewed by people for new roles. At the same time I’m being asked to take on more responsibility in my day-to-day role. The extra responsibility will help me enormously when I come to apply for more senior roles in my organisation. It’s a secure position from which I could apply anywhere else in the wider organisation. From where I am I get first dibs on a number of roles. I won’t get that from the outside. I’ll lose the contacts and the network: as much as I hope we’ll stay in touch, there’ll be soft little bits of friction that wear away the relationships like tissue on stone. But the more I talk to my friends and colleagues, the more I realise I’ll need to have been out for a little while before I can come back. I need to do a reverse tour of duty: live a life of high pay and international travel before I come back to do the hard, necessary work I love.

I realise suddenly that my friend hears the call just as strongly as I do. The difference between us is that he’s come to peace with the balance, with the in-between-ness of being halfway between the two. I’m almost there now. I’m going to take the role, if it’s offered, and try to improve my skills before coming back to public service in two or three years. I think I can do it.

Only one way to find out.

Weeknotes S04E11: Is this the point at which everything changes?

There’s a point in every story when the author has to sit down and work out how to develop the character further. No different with me. I’m sitting and weighing up different roles in an attempt to figure out how to drive my personal development in the direction I want it to go.

Part of that will be a job, and part of that will be the not-job space in between. Many things have happened this week. I think about…4.

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