Rāhui (Lockdown) Day (I need to check, I’ve lost count.
Checked it’s Day 38 (40): a few good days, and a few crappy ones. It feels already like today will be one of the latter and the black dog is definitely sniffing at the door; it may already be in the room. As quite often happens – I don’t hate the dog, in fact I’m rather fond of it, it’s kept me company through my whole life and, despite its best efforts, it hasn’t killed me yet … but we both know there will come a day – it’s the realization that:
a) I’m engaged with a group of people who don’t really give a shit,
b) I’m doing a truckload of work but to no end,
c) the others are mostly doing fuck all,
d) the only feedback I ever get is negative,
e) the work I do is dismissed or slagged off by people who’ve not taken the time to read it or understand it but who are threatened by it – not by the work itself (they won’t even have read it) but by the mere fact that, because it exists at all, it seems to show up their raw laziness because all they do is turn up for meetings, unprepared, and, feeling inadequate, the only tool they have is to hit out, and I wear it,
f) there’s not a single person prepared to step in and offer support. They’re all too fucking scared. So I get depressed and I find myself, again (this isn’t new) clinging to the cliff by the fingertips of one hand – always my right hand, my dominant hand – while I scramble around in Ken Robinson’s metaphorical library of the mind grasping with my pathetic, arthritis-ridden, left hand for some sage wisdom that will be enough to stop me plummeting to the bottom of whatever it is I’m suspended over.
I found this piece on LinkedIn this morning and it resonated enough to enable me to get a singular, momentary grip. What shocked me initially was that the person who posted it – a man I respect but in whose company will never walk (I am way too insignificant and invisible ever to be seen there, status is all) – was so tone deaf that he didn’t note that the pronouns in the Roosevelt piece were all gendered male thereby ensuring that the responses of women readers would be those of an observer rather than a participant in the visceral and immediate experience recorded.
Odd, I thought, since most of the visible, transformational leaders working in the international COVID-19 space are women and some are quite close to home. Maybe it was because women leaders don’t engage as much in the ‘dust, sweat and blood’ exchanges recorded in the Roosevelt paragraph and he was simply acknowledging this, I pondered positively, but when I stopped trying to find excuses for him I realised that, when it comes to 21st century humanism – I doubt feminism has even tickled his cloistered hide – this chap, young though he is and very senior, was still living in the ivy-clad halls of pre-Great War European academe and that it was this that drew him to the piece. Here it is:
‘Roosevelt, Sorbonne University in 1910 on leadership: “It is not the critic who counts; not the person who points out how the strong stumble, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the one who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who actually strives to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends themself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if they fail, they at least fail while daring greatly, so that their place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat”.’
Quite cool, eh?
A tad Kiplingesque, I’ll give you that. It’s certainly riddled with ‘we will fight them on the beaches’ bombast tempered a little by a sprinkling of ‘into the valley of death’ schoolboy rhetoric but overall, it’s poignant especially when resurrected by someone who doesn’t tend to live, on a daily basis, in the sort of brutally, mangled world many of us lesser leaders inhabit. I respect that. Good for him. His is a world I might have once, from time to time, lusted after, but mine is more like the world Teddy talks of, a world of blood, sweat, tears – my own and those of others – and these factors have never been a nouveau novelty for those leaders who champ at the visceral bit as often as I do.
So, I hear you plead if you’ve stuck with me this long, where’s the offensive, 19th century, gendered language? Well, it’s gone. I changed it, precious pup that I am. I wanted to see if I could make it slap me into consciousness as it clearly had my exhausted LinkedIn buddy (actually, he’s not my buddy. I doubt I would ever come into his purview let alone be seen as someone with whom he would ever want to link his name. I understand this, and accept it with appropriate forelock-tugging deference).
So, read it again, and for every gender-neutral word put ‘him’ or ‘he’ or ‘man’ or ‘a man’ and you can rebuild for yourself what resonated so much with my colleague and which, for different reasons, poked me in the eyes with its contemporary tone-deafness. Did you see what I did there, eyes and ears, sensory vilification? Oh well …
When the dog isn’t snuffling, I tend, mostly, to fall back on the words of Brené Brown, author of ‘Daring Greatly’ which was apparently inspired by the Roosevelt quote. She said ‘If you’re not in the arena with me getting your ass kicked, I’m not interested in your feedback’.
These were the learned and sage words I found on my quest today. I’m glad I looked. Maybe my dear friend Whaea Jackie who runs The Aunties would interpret Browns words slightly differently as ‘just tell them to get fucked, darling’ just tell them to get fucked’.
Yep, that too. That too.
Cool bananas, then, on the best of days, I reckon it’s all cool bananas, but today, sadly, is not one of the bestest of cool banana days.
Time to go and feed the beast.
dykiegirl 