January 22
The wheel is mine, and I turn it: whoever stood at the top a moment ago sinks; whoever lay at the bottom rises. Climb onto my wheel — but do not complain when it turns, for this is its nature.
The Consolation of Philosophy (freely rendered)
Listening mode
The wheel is mine, and I turn it: whoever stood at the top a moment ago sinks; whoever lay at the bottom rises. Climb onto my wheel — but do not complain when it turns, for this is its nature.
There are times when almost everything works out. Requests are answered quickly, a proposal meets with approval, a meeting gets postponed just when you couldn't have made it anyway. After a while you take this to be your way of going about things. That isn't entirely wrong. You really did put in the work.
When things then turn sluggish, you look for the mistake. Sometimes you find one. Often, though, you've done nothing differently from before, and that is exactly what's hard to bear. A mistake you could fix. A reversal with no discernible cause leaves you nothing to do except carry on as before, only without the confirmation.
Yet in the good times you never asked yourself the same question. You never took apart an accepted proposal as thoroughly as you now take apart a rejected one. Success seemed to you the normal state of things, failure a deviation that owes you an explanation.
The next morning you write the next request. You phrase it the way you did back when the answers still came quickly, and you don't know whether it was ever down to these sentences.
