The Becoming Code

“Can we talk tomorrow?”

That was the email.

Six words.

I read it once.

Fine.

Then again.

Slightly less fine.

Third time?

We now apparently had an issue.

It was shorter than this person normally writes.

There was no:

“Nothing bad!”

No smiley face.

No helpful explanation.

Not even a “thanks.”

Just:

“Can we talk tomorrow?”

So naturally, with absolutely no additional evidence, my brain got to work.

Had I missed something?

Were they unhappy about a decision?

Had someone said something?

Was there another conversation happening somewhere?

By this point I wasn’t reading the email anymore.

I was reading my explanation of the email.

That’s different.

Eventually I went back and looked at what was actually there.

Six words.

No accusation.

No anger.

No evidence of a problem.

Just a request to talk tomorrow.

So I left it.

Mostly.

Let’s not exaggerate my personal growth.

The next morning we talked.

They wanted my thoughts on something.

That was it.

My version had subplots.

Their version barely had a plot.

And I’ve been thinking about how quickly we do this when information is incomplete.

A short text.

A delayed reply.

Someone’s tone in a meeting.

A closed office door.

“No.”

“Okay.”

“Call me.”

We receive the fact.

Then apparently open an internal writers’ room.

Sometimes we’re right.

Experience exists for a reason.

But sometimes the story becomes so convincing that we begin responding to something that hasn’t actually happened.

Yesterday the email didn’t change once.

The person who read it did.

Which message gets you?

“Can we talk?”

“Call me.”

“K.”

Or is there another one?

Someone apologized to me yesterday.

I nearly replied:

“No problem.”

There was, technically, a problem.

They’d changed something.

It affected my afternoon.

I’d have to move something I’d already planned and do a little more work.

Nothing catastrophic.

But definitely more than no problem.

Still, the words were already on their way out.

I use them constantly.

“No problem.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“All good.”

They’re useful little sentences.

They tell the other person:

You’re safe.

I’m not angry.

We’ll figure this out.

I like being that person.

But yesterday I noticed how quickly reassurance can become inaccurate.

So instead I said:

“It’s okay. I’ll need to move a couple of things, but we’ll work it out.”

Then waited for the enormous interpersonal crisis I’d apparently been preventing all these years.

It didn’t arrive.

They said:

“Thank you. I really appreciate it.”

We changed the plan.

End of story.

Except I’ve thought about it since.

Because there’s a difference between making someone feel bad about inconveniencing you…

and refusing to let them know they inconvenienced you at all.

I’ve probably confused those occasionally.

I don’t want to become someone who announces every sacrifice.

Nobody needs a detailed invoice for the emotional cost of moving a meeting twenty minutes.

But I also don’t think generosity requires editing reality.

Sometimes there was a problem.

Sometimes it cost something.

Sometimes you’re still willing to do it.

All three can apparently be true at once.

Here’s the one I’m curious about:

Which do you say automatically?

“No problem.”

“I’m fine.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Whatever works.”

Or something else?

I had nothing to do yesterday.

Not nothing to do in the Sunday-afternoon sense.

I mean there were people I love in the room…

and none of them needed anything from me.

Two of them were sitting at the table doing something together.

There were rules.

Apparently several of them were open to interpretation.

Something fell on the floor.

They dealt with it.

One asked a question.

The other answered.

There was a minor disagreement.

For a moment, I could feel myself preparing to become the Supreme Court.

Then they sorted it out themselves.

So I made tea.

I stood at the counter for a while.

Sat down nearby.

Listened to half the conversation.

Didn’t understand most of it.

And eventually I noticed something slightly uncomfortable.

I was looking for somewhere to be useful.

Did they want a drink?

No.

Need help?

No.

Hungry?

Apparently not.

There was no role available.

Which shouldn’t matter.

Except I have spent years being very good at roles.

Leader.

Problem solver.

Dad.

Organizer.

The person who knows what happens next.

Those roles matter enormously to me.

But yesterday afternoon, none of them were particularly required.

I was just in the room.

And nobody seemed disappointed by the reduced service offering.

We stayed like that for about forty minutes.

They did their thing.

I drank my tea.

Every so often one of them said something to me.

Then went back to what they were doing.

Nothing needed fixing.

Nothing needed leading.

Nobody needed me.

They just seemed to want me there.

I’m noticing that’s different.

I realized yesterday that I sometimes ask questions I already have the answer to.

“Everything go okay?”

I could see that it had.

Someone I trust had spent several hours with someone I love.

When I saw them afterward, they were laughing about something that had happened.

There was food involved.

Possibly an argument about something completely inconsequential.

I caught enough to know they’d had a good time.

And I nearly started doing what I normally do.

What did you guys do?

Where did you go?

What did you eat?

What time did you…?

Nothing unreasonable.

They’re normal questions.

But I noticed something underneath them.

I wanted the missing hours back.

Not literally.

I wanted the story complete.

I hadn’t been there, so I wanted enough information to build the part I’d missed.

Yesterday I didn’t.

I asked one question about the story already being told.

Then we moved on.

Later, I realized I still didn’t know exactly what they’d done for most of the afternoon.

And nothing in me needed to fix that.

Well.

Almost nothing.

There was definitely a small internal compliance department requesting documentation.

It was denied.

I’ve been thinking about how responsibility changes your relationship with information.

When you’re responsible, knowing matters.

You check.

Follow up.

Close the loop.

At work, those instincts have served me extremely well.

But people aren’t open tasks.

And time that happens without me isn’t missing information.

Sometimes it’s simply someone else’s afternoon.

I nearly “helped” someone yesterday.

He hadn’t asked.

Nothing was going wrong.

Those details feel relevant.

I’d asked him to take care of something.

Later, I happened to walk past while he was working on it.

And immediately I noticed he wasn’t doing it the way I would have.

He’d started somewhere else.

Organized something differently.

Had a conversation earlier than I would have.

I stopped.

My brain very generously produced three improvements.

Maybe four.

All available at no additional charge.

Then I had a question:

Is there actually a problem?

There wasn’t.

He knew what the outcome needed to be.

Nothing important was being missed.

He simply wasn’t following the invisible instructions that apparently existed only in my head.

So I kept walking.

I won’t pretend this was some enormous act of restraint.

I made it about fifteen feet before looking back once.

Still becoming.

Later he brought me what he’d finished.

It worked.

One part was different from how I’d imagined it.

Better, actually.

And I realized how easy it is to confuse:

I know how to do this

with

therefore this is how it should be done.

Experience gives you shortcuts.

Patterns.

Standards.

Things worth teaching.

But apparently it can also give you a very detailed opinion about things that aren’t actually problems.

Yesterday I asked someone to own something.

For once, I noticed the moment I nearly took a small piece of it back.

There were seven seconds of silence in a meeting yesterday.

I know this because I became extremely aware of approximately six of them.

Someone had finished speaking.

Nobody immediately responded.

And almost automatically, I started assembling something to say.

Not because I disagreed.

Not because the meeting was stuck.

There was just…

silence.

I’ve spent enough years in meetings to have developed a fairly reliable set of tools for this.

Ask the question.

Summarize what you’ve heard.

Move the conversation forward.

Bring someone else in.

Make the slightly inappropriate joke that gets everyone breathing again.

Useful skills.

Except yesterday, nobody needed rescuing.

So I didn’t say anything.

Three seconds passed.

Then four.

By five, seven seconds had somehow become a significant portion of my adult life.

At six, someone across the table shifted in his chair.

Then said:

“I think we’re avoiding the actual question.”

And suddenly the conversation became much more interesting.

I’ve been thinking about that.

Because I don’t believe my instinct to contribute is fake.

I like contributing.

I like helping rooms move.

I like making things clearer.

But usefulness can become so familiar that you stop noticing when you’ve volunteered for it.

A question hangs in the air.

Answer it.

Someone looks uncertain.

Help.

Conversation stalls.

Move it.

Yesterday there was an empty space in a room.

For seven seconds, I didn’t make it mine.

Someone else did.

Turns out they were there too.

Someone misunderstood me yesterday.

And I didn’t correct him.

This sounds much more dramatic than it was.

We were standing around talking when he mentioned a decision I’d made and casually explained why he thought I’d made it.

His explanation was reasonable.

Kind, even.

It was also wrong.

Immediately, I had the missing context ready.

There had been another conversation.

Something had happened earlier.

I’d considered something he didn’t know about.

Give me ninety seconds and I could have made the whole thing make sense.

I nearly did.

Then someone else spoke.

The conversation moved on.

And for a few minutes, I noticed myself waiting for an opportunity to bring it back.

Not because his misunderstanding mattered.

Because it existed.

Somewhere in the world there was now a slightly inaccurate version of me walking around in another person’s head.

Apparently, I wanted to edit it.

I didn’t.

We kept talking.

Later I found myself wondering whether he’d left still believing what he’d said.

Probably.

Nothing happened.

This isn’t an argument for allowing important misunderstandings to stand.

There are moments when clarity matters enormously.

Yesterday wasn’t one of them.

It was one person having an incomplete explanation for one decision I had made.

Which, when I say it like that, sounds remarkably survivable.

Maybe the interesting part wasn’t that he misunderstood me.

It was discovering how accustomed I am to being my own publicist.

I deliberately made my drive to work longer this morning.

There was no traffic on my usual route.

No road closure.

I hadn’t missed a turn.

I simply got to the intersection where I normally turn right…

and went straight.

There’s another route to work that takes about twelve minutes longer.

It’s not particularly scenic.

There’s a stretch beside the river.

Some older houses.

Too many traffic lights.

A bakery I’ve driven past dozens of times and still haven’t visited.

I like it.

And apparently that wasn’t enough information for my brain.

Within about a minute, I was already constructing reasons for the decision.

It would give me time to think.

Maybe the slower drive would make the morning less rushed.

Perhaps there was something useful about changing routine.

All very respectable.

Also invented after I’d already made the turn.

The actual reason was much smaller.

I wanted to go that way.

That’s it.

I arrived at work twelve minutes later than I normally would.

Nobody noticed.

Nothing was lost.

And the drive didn’t teach me anything.

Which feels important to mention.

I didn’t discover the importance of slowing down.

I didn’t suddenly see my life differently.

I drove past a man walking a small dog.

Stopped at four red lights.

Listened to half a song twice because I restarted it.

Then went to work.

I just liked that road better this morning.

Maybe preference doesn’t always need to become a principle.

I had two completely free hours yesterday.

No plans.

No work that needed finishing.

Nobody expecting me anywhere.

And almost immediately, I started trying to make the time worthwhile.

Maybe I’d read.

Go for a walk.

Get something done around the house.

Call someone I hadn’t spoken to recently.

There were plenty of respectable options.

Instead, I made a sandwich and put on an old film.

I’d already seen it.

Which somehow made the decision even less defensible.

About halfway through, I fell asleep.

Not intentionally.

I woke up twenty minutes later and kept watching.

Then at 4:37, I went into the kitchen to make tea and caught myself thinking:

I haven’t done anything with the afternoon.

Which was accurate.

It was also strange.

Nobody had given those two hours a job.

I had.

I’d taken an empty piece of Sunday and quietly introduced expectations.

Rest properly.

Enjoy it properly.

Use it well.

Make a memory.

Come back better.

Apparently even doing nothing can become something to succeed at.

I didn’t make the most of yesterday afternoon.

I made a sandwich.

Watched most of a film.

Slept through some of it.

Made tea.

By dinner, the two hours were gone.

Nothing to show for them.

I’m not sure they owed me anything.

I put my phone in a drawer yesterday.

That sounds considerably more intentional than it was.

I was waiting for a reply to something important.

I’d sent it Friday afternoon.

Saturday morning, I checked.

Nothing.

Eleven minutes later, I caught myself checking again.

Still nothing.

This was useful information because apparently I’d begun operating a highly inefficient personal delivery service in which repeatedly opening my inbox might help the other person type faster.

So I put the phone in the kitchen drawer.

Not for the day.

Not because phones are ruining civilization.

I just wanted the next check to require an extra movement.

Then I went out.

I needed something from the hardware store.

A few hours later, I found myself standing in an aisle comparing two screws that appeared, to me, to be exactly the same screw.

And somewhere around there I realized I hadn’t thought about the reply for a while.

That interested me.

Because waiting has a strange way of making something that is happening elsewhere feel like it is happening to you continuously.

But it wasn’t.

Someone, somewhere, had either replied or hadn’t.

Meanwhile I was buying the wrong screw.

I checked my phone later.

Still nothing.

The answer hadn’t arrived.

Saturday had.