The Question Declined

Part One

The loss of sharpness is one of the more difficult experiences to describe accurately, because it does not arrive as a single event. It arrives as a drift. The drift is gradual enough that on any given day, looking back to the previous day, nothing has changed. Across months, looking back to the year before, something has changed but you cannot quite put a finger on what. Across years, looking back to the version of yourself who used to operate routinely at a level you can no longer routinely access, you can see it clearly, but the path between then and now is too gradual to retrace.

This makes it different from most of the other problems senior people encounter. A bad quarter is obvious. A failed initiative is obvious. A health scare is obvious. The slow erosion of the edge that made the career possible is not obvious until it is well advanced, and by then the question of what to do about it has acquired the weight of an entire decade.

What is happening underneath the drift is rarely what the standard explanations suggest. It is not, usually, that the brain is ageing in any meaningful way. It is not, usually, that the workload has increased beyond capacity. The workload, in absolute terms, is often lighter than it was at the most acute peak of the career. What is happening is that the alignment between the person now and the work they are now doing has thinned. The work is no longer pulling out of them what it once did, because what it needs is no longer what they have most readily available.

The private theory most people develop about this is built around the assumption that the work is the constant and they are the variable. The work has not changed. They have changed. So the problem must be in them. Therefore the fix must be in them. Sleep better. Eat better. Exercise more. Cut back. Push harder. Manage the time. None of these moves address the underlying question, because the underlying question is whether the work itself is now mismatched to who they have become. That question is a different category of question, and the fixes in the first category do not touch it.

Part Two

The reason the question goes unasked is that asking it is expensive. The cost of even letting it be asked, internally, is that the person has to consider answers they may not want to consider. The role they have built. The identity built around the role. The income. The structure of the life that has been organised around the role. The expectations of the people around them. The story they have been telling themselves about why this is the work they are doing.

The performance self that has been running the career is not, structurally, equipped to handle this question. The performance self handles problems within a frame. The question of whether the frame itself is still the right frame is not a problem the performance self can solve, because the performance self is the product of the frame. Asking the question requires stepping outside the frame for long enough to look at it, and the performance self has not been trained to do that.

In my own case, the question was one I declined to ask for several years, and then declined to take seriously for several more after that. The diabetes diagnosis at forty did not, on its own, make me look at it. The body recovery took three years and did not, on its own, answer it. What eventually made the question unavoidable was the discovery that the body had recovered and the underlying sense of misalignment had not. That was the point at which the performance self ran out of fixes, and a different kind of work had to begin.

In the practice I run now, the question is sometimes the first thing we look at and sometimes the thing we work toward through other questions. It depends on where the person is. The Diagnostic stage is, in part, a way of finding out whether the question is already half-asked, fully declined, or somewhere in between. The work that follows is not, in most cases, a single answer. It is a way of holding the question that allows the answer, or answers, to arrive without the urgency that the performance self brings to everything else.

What changes when the question is allowed in is not, at first, dramatic. The role does not necessarily change. The job does not necessarily change. What changes is the relationship between the person and the work. The drift slows. Sometimes it reverses. The sharpness, where it returns, returns differently. Not as the edge of the same instrument it used to be, but as a different kind of capacity that the work, now done from a different place, calls forward.

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