Impermanence

In youth, the world feels wide and firm,
A blanket warm, of no fixed term.
A goal once scored, a test once passed,
Give reputations that seem to last.
We think the world is carved forever,
But even hardest stone can weather.
Each toy, each room, each loving face
Feels like a fixed and sacred place.

 But slowly, cracks begin to show:
The things we love begin to go.
The blanket frays, the toy is torn,
The house abandoned, dreams outworn.
We learn to move, to not hold tight,
To chase new dawns and leave the night
Achievements fade, they do not stay;
What mattered once flows swift away.

 The friends we knew drift out of view,
And rust creeps in on hobbies too.
The body speaks in aches and pains,
A wart, a wrinkle, weathered strains.
The mirror shows a stranger’s face,
Time’s quiet theft we can’t replace. 

The fields we roamed are homes today,
Where other children laugh and play.
Their world is new, but soon they’ll find
It too will vanish, left behind.
We hoped to change the world, and tried,
But dreams like ours have often died:
The young now hold that hopeful flame;
They’ll fail, like us, and feel the same. 

All things must pass, and none endure:
Not joy, nor youth, nor love held pure.
Love fades in chores and compromise,
In sleepless nights and silent sighs.
Two hearts once one now beat apart,
Routine erodes the tender start.
Planning meals and buying clothing
Drains our feelings into nothing. 

We learn not to believe the lie
That joy will last and never die.
We age, we bend, we break, we fall
And in the end, we lose it all.
We craft with care a short-lived shell,
Designed to crack, designed to sell.
Made to break, not made to last
Each plastic thing replaced so fast.
They sang with hope, “Change is gonna come,”
But rot set in and made us numb.
The only change we’ve ever known
Is time’s slow grind through flesh and bone. 

We tell the young, “It’s yours to fix,”
But time plays cruel and clever tricks.
They’ll chase the dream, as once did we,
Blind to cost, too proud to see.
When they learn what we have known,
The seeds they sowed are overgrown.
The soil reclaims what once stood tall,
Whether flower, tree or crumbling wall,
Love and hate, fear or trust:
dreams dissolve to ash and dust. 

Hope and glory are flames then embers
Fleeting passions none now remembers
The stars look on, but never speak,
The silence grows; strength turns weak
No final stand, no valiant fight,
Just my rage at the dying light.
We could face our impermanence,
The world’s intrinsic heartlessness,
But life is short, attentions wander
Brief opportunity is squandered.
The heat of youth now a diamond core,
Hardened, cold, alive no more
The fight was lost before it came,
Rules were rigged, results prearranged.
Now apathy and grief remain:
I used to care but things have changed.
Brief sparks of joy, moments of pain:
We are but motes in endless rain.

An ode to niceness

We praise the kind, the soft, the sweet,
Who smooth the path of all they meet.

A gentle word, a smiling face—
Is this the mark of moral grace?

But niceness, warm and neatly spun,
Can smooth the path where wrongs still run.

To soothe, to spare, to not offend—
May comfort now, but harm in the end.
When feelings rule and thought is slight
We turn away from what is right.

A hive of hearts, attuned to pain,
Demands we bend, again, again.
Yet moral weight is not a mood,
Nor virtue found in platitude.

A treat for tears, a queue ignored,
A compliment too freely poured—

Each gesture smooth, but out of place,

When fairness loses to soft grace.
These acts, though nice, may miss the mark
of progress on the moral arc.

They calm the storm, but in their wake,

Leave deeper wrongs we must unmake.

So let us care, but not be led
By every whim or tear that's shed.
For niceness, when it takes the stage,
Can dim the light of a reasoned age. 

The leader for this story is not a good leader

 

Consistent and stoic, Leah Williamson is most natural of unnatural leaders | England women's football team | The Guardian

Consistent and stoic, Leah Williamson is most natural of unnatural leaders History-making England captain is often seen barking orders but has a more introverted persona off the pitch www.theguardian.com

 '

What a stupid headline and analysis of leadership. Who thinks that consistency and stoicism are not leadership traits?

'She is the most natural of unnatural leaders, seen barking orders in huddles and firing the team up in stark contrast with her more introverted persona off the pitch. That is a learned trait...She plays and leads with an emotional intelligence, often seen deep in conversation with Sarina Wiegman whenever there is a pause in play, the mind constantly analysing, learning, recalculating...'

Wait, what? The mind constantly analysing, learning and recalculating is, er, emotional intelligence? I think that consistency (of approach), stoicism and constant analysis are very natural traits for good leadership. I also consider them strengths of mine.

What this author has implied is that the traits we usually select for leadership are indeed natural traits for good leadership: a dominating, expressive, loud presence; emotionality that mimics charisma; forceful, quick and individually-made decisions; and a confidence that drives all before it.

This is the sort of person who rises to leadership in a vacuum. Someone whose forceful personality drowns out caution and leaps into action before anyone else has considered what is best. And because we're accustomed to such leaders in playground games, we come to expect such leadership in more serious situations, until finally we believe that this is good leadership and we only pick such people to be leaders. And they, in turn, believe in themselves, and select others like them to succeed.

Such people, however, need to be controlled. They are disrupting forces who mess up team co-ordination and silence productivity. The point of systems, and formal selection processes, is not to imitate what would happen in anarchy, but to reach a better solution. We should select leaders, not noisy self-confident shysters. 

We have seen 'emotional intelligence' become a bit of a fashionable term, associated with femininity, while plain old intelligence is boringly masculine. This is presumably why the author tried to claim that Ms Williamson was demonstrating emotional intelligence as a leader. But in truth, we have suffered far too much from leaders relying on emotional intelligence. It is emotional intelligence to charm, smarm and browbeat people into agreement; this requires the ability to understand the audience's feelings and apply such tactics. It is emotional intelligence that underpins charisma, and we often say that emotional stability and confidence come from emotional intelligence; whereas self-doubt and hesitation require further self-reflection.

It is real intelligence that we lack in our leadership. A mind capable of constant analysis, with the sense to recognise that others can have good ideas and the ability to recognise those ideas. Intelligence means knowing that complex problems are complex and that the greatest risk comes from underestimating them by diving in without care or due diligence.  Intelligence is holding back from hazarding an opinion until you have as much information as possible.

People seem to have conflated arrogance with intelligence. It's not clever to blast your own ideas out first, trusting that they're usually good. 'Usually' is not 'always' and 'good' is not 'perfect'. What we think of as leadership is a sign of confidence and, perhaps, above-average but not amazing ability; the ability to have pretty good ideas and the willingness to promote them without ever supposing that there could be a better one. We don't need 'emotional intelligence' as a counter to this; we need more plain-old-boring intelligence. 

There is an old truism that when you ask a researcher in a field how much he knows about it, he will say "almost nothing", whereas an undergraduate or casual reader might claim to have very good knowledge of it.

We are too accustomed to assuming that the bright undergraduates who are over-promoted to positions of leadership in politics and business are humanity's best paragons of intelligence, when in truth our selection is deeply flawed. It's not intelligence that sees a bright undergraduate slave away for 16-hour days at a job which will promote only 10% to great wealth. If I offered you an employment contract of working 8 hours a day for me for 3 years, after which I might or might not choose to pay you a salary for your time, you'd turn me down. Yet this is effectively the offer from the highly-respected consultancies, law firms and banks: give us your free time and we might promote you later.

Anyone taking such an offer is either dangerously risk-seeking, deluded or has inside information and connections. Promotion is dependent on sucking up and networking, so perhaps these bright young things fancy their chances. But most likely they believe that hard work will achieve their goals, as it has throughout their schooling. Because these are not the brightest people who found schoolwork easy: these are the hard workers who did well because of their work ethic. That's not a bad thing, but it is a different thing. These are not paragons of brilliance. They are laudably hard-workers: important workers in a modern economy, no more and no less.

The author also unwittingly points out another aspect of leadership that we often overlook: Ms Williamson shows a 'learned trait'. We often think of leaders as born, not made. We trust that charisma, confidence and the ability to fast-talk others is innate and celebrate those who have managed to acquire and use these traits, but we work hard to try to teach people to understand and calculate. Various organisations I have been in seem to have assumed that leaders will find a way to understand a subject, or use underlings to do so, and that they, and others, should be promoted based on social performance.

I hazard the unpopular thesis that someone responsible for anything should understand what it is they are responsible for. People who are good at networking, brown-nosing bosses and dumping colleagues in trouble are showing precisely the behaviours that we do not want in senior positions. 

There should be nothing 'unnatural' about an adult displaying learned behaviour. We are humans: we are different from other animals because of our enormous, adaptable brainpower. It's natural to use it; if anything, it is inhuman to fail to learn and adapt.

When I was applying for graduate entry jobs, or thereabouts, I underwent a large number of quizzes about my behaviours. Mostly my real answers were not one of the multiple choice options: I wanted to say "it depends on what my boss expects, on organisational culture, on explicit instructions" but instead I had to pick one from four inadequate multiple choice options, and it seems I always got it wrong. They were looking, perhaps, for traditional leaders - have-a-go-failures who'd try to take on everything whether they had the information and ability to do it well or not, when my tendency, absent instruction or encouragement, would be to do what I am capable of and defer to others of supposedly greater ability on other things. 

But one instruction (e.g. "don't pester me unless it is [this urgent]" would be sufficient to change me into a different worker. Because I can learn and adapt. Yes, it rankles years later. I'd rather have had a choice of well-regarded fast-track careers to greatness than spend years in career doldrums. 

There is no harm in learning to behave in a better way. We start as mewling babes, puking in our mother's arms, and only gradually learn to be more thoughtful in our interactions with others. Deliberate behaviour is no less meaningful or leader-like for being deliberate. In fact, I would argue that it is more valuable, demonstrating that real thought and intent has gone into it, rather than it coming from an uncomprehending animal who is merely fortunate that his instincts have worked well for it so far, which is how I would describe some of our most famous 'leaders'.

In fact, Ms Williamson is clearly a natural leader. Our perception of leadership is so flawed that a writer can write the opposite and have it published, which is a far more interesting story.

What causes misanthropy

 

I heard a podcast recently about stroke care: the sad fact that over the couple of decades between her husband dying from a stroke and her son having one stroke care has barely changed. She talks of how doctors assumed in both cases that disability was permanent, and rapid decline to death inevitable, and that this was their prognosis.

She was a journalist, and spoke to various stroke experts, and the more expert they were, the less certainty they had over any one prognosis. Her husband had begun to recover his ability to write when he died; her son had regained the ability to walk, but she had to fight for his treatment. Emergency thrombolytic treatment has been invented that reduces the damage caused by a stroke but is to be given within 4 hours of the stroke.

He had a stroke while sleeping and when his wife woke up in the middle of the night was told an ambulance would take 4 hours to arrive. A kind neighbour drove him to A&E and they arrived 4.5 hours after he had gone to sleep.

They initially refused him the thrombolytic treatment, even though the 4 hour limit is a guideline: biology rarely has absolute cut-offs, and also despite the fact that it was most likely the stroke had occurred within the 4 hour limit.

He was given physiotherapy, which is vital for stroke patients; they need constant exercise for their immobile limbs to prevent them painfully atrophying and help them rebuild the nerve connections for control. But the hospital could only manage 2 sessions a week, which hardly counts as constant. 2 a day would be effective: one stroke expert she interviewed called his 'homeopathic physiotherapy'.

I find such stories annoying much of the time: one anecdote proves nothing about the wider world. This one chimed with me because it is exactly how my mother died. She had a catastrophic stroke during surgery (we will never know, now, whether this was a mistake or a tragic accident) and spent a couple of weeks on a stroke ward receiving care and physiotherapy. She smiled, she talked, she beat the staff at Scrabble and was, broadly, her normal self, despite being completely paralysed on her left side: her arm would not move, her left mouth barely moved.

Then the hospital said it needed the bed and kicked her out to a care home. Without physiotherapy her immobile arm seized up and she was given massive doses of opiates to kill the pain. These also sedate people, and she spent the rest of her miserable life either forced asleep or in even greater pain than she had endured during her better years, before finally dying of a lung infection, probably caused by breathing in food when someone in the care home was trying to get through the long list of people needing to be fed.

These concrete anecdotes demonstrate how lack of funding directly kills people. It's not just an abstract concept that means nothing. Ambulance services that cause many emergencies to wait; junior doctors who don't fully understand the treatment protocols because they've been given massive responsibility, insufficient training and are stretched too thin; physiotherapy cut to nothing because it doesn't sound important; stroke wards with capacity for one third of the stroke patients in the area (and because this kills off so many early, this could be more like one fifth of an appropriate level); these all kill people.

When our doctors provide us with a bad prognosis, it might be their experience, but it might also be a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's not the case that disease is simply terrible and bad outcomes inevitable.  This is sometimes true, but often we have caused the outcome to be bad through our voting choices. I would give all my wealth for my mother to have been saved for another few years of conversation. Most people feel the same way about those they love. And yet we resent tax increases of a few pennies; we prefer to have a bit more money to spend on cheap tat than keep people alive.

Every week there's another story about a brave campaigning family trying to get very expensive treatment for a disease. Hospital bosses are typically portrayed as the enemy, evilly refusing treatment that this family knows might help.

That money might save dozens if the boss spends it on faster ambulances, or a handful of people if on physiotherapy. Hospital bosses are papering over massive holes in care, barely managing to make it look serviceable. You might argue that this is counter-productive; that if they funded some carefully and had none left for the more expensive diseases at all this would show how poorly-funded they are. You might argue that some hospitals are run inefficiently: that some bosses are better than others and inefficiency could be spent on care. This is probably true, but this will be 1 or 2%, or maybe 5% of the total. 

The real enemy is us. We are the ones giving bosses 50% of what they need. We vote for politicians who say they will fix things by reorganisation and new targets, and maybe a 1% increase in funding for some areas when inflation is 6%. We voted for politicians who burdened hospitals with massive, real, PFI costs just so that they could pull off an accounting trick.

We need to stop ascribing to disease what is a result of our social systems. When doctors give a prognosis for a stroke, that's more because of human decisions than biological necessity. 

When I think of why my mother died, it wasn't an inevitable consequence of disease. It might have been a careless anaesthetist. It wasn't a mean hospital boss; it wasn't the consultant who discharged her from the ward. It was you. It was the people I walk past on the street. It was the not-so-great British public who voted for a Conservative government that cut government services. She died because of humanity's short-sighted selfishness, trying desperately to grasp onto a few pieces of silver at the expense of our humanity.