On the Man You Are at Work

You have a job. Most of you have quite a serious one. You spend the day being the person other people rely on to be certain, and you are good at it, and it costs you rather more than you tend to admit.

I meet the other man. Not the tired one, the one underneath. And I have noticed, over a long time now, that the men who carry the most authority in daylight are very often the ones who arrive here wanting none of it.

This is not a contradiction and I would like to take it away from you as a worry. It is not a hidden flaw running under an otherwise competent life. It is the ordinary arithmetic of holding a position. Decisions accumulate. Each one is small, none of them can be handed back, and by evening a man can be quietly exhausted by nothing more dramatic than having been in charge since eight in the morning.

What you want from me is not weakness. It is a rest from deciding.

Some of you worry that the two versions will contaminate each other. That if you kneel in the evening you will be less certain in the morning. In my experience the opposite happens. A man who has somewhere to put it down is steadier the next day rather than shakier, because the weight was going to weigh what it weighs whether or not he had anywhere to set it.

I have no interest in your title and I do not ask what you do until you offer it. Not because it is shameful, but because it is not the part of you I am speaking to. You are not here as a rank. You are here as a man who wants something specific and has finally said so.

You do not have to reconcile them. You are allowed to be entirely capable at four in the afternoon and entirely mine at ten at night, and neither one of those is the performance.