The Rhythm of Our Days

Each Friday I send an email to the broad communications team at Microsoft, titled, naturally, TGIF. :) Sometimes I share these externally; below is the one I sent earlier today.

The rhythm of our days has changed, and for me at least, no new rhythm has yet emerged. Days might start and end earlier; or later. There are interruptions, sudden pauses in the day, to help with schoolwork, prevent the dog from barking, fold bread dough as it rises, things that never took place in the office. Our planning rhythm has also altered at work, as we adjust to virtual events, the required changes to priorities, the way we engage with editors, reporters, analysts, employees. Here, I can sense the start of a new rhythm, still faint perhaps, but emerging as we learn from each success, and from things that don’t work. We have long talked about the different “beats” in our news motion, and look, they are still here, if we listen hard enough.

Out in the world, I see people looking for a new rhythm as well. Sometimes it is about replacing one tradition with another – a video call over beers replaces meeting at the local pub. Other times it is reflected in a question about previously strongly held beliefs and values, as we saw in Marc Andreesen’s essay this past weekend, where he talked about the need to build, real things of real value. I see this as a return to roots for him; after all as the person who essentially bootstrapped the browsers that allows all of us to connect to the web, he built something of incredible value for billions of people, and then took a step over to a VC firm where perhaps he and his firm focused on investment and profit and maybe less on building use. He captures the essence of this return when he says:

Every step of the way, to everyone around us, we should be asking the question, what are you building? What are you building directly, or helping other people to build, or teaching other people to build, or taking care of people who are building? If the work you’re doing isn’t either leading to something being built or taking care of people directly, we’ve failed you, and we need to get you into a position, an occupation, a career where you can contribute to building. There are always outstanding people in even the most broken systems — we need to get all the talent we can on the biggest problems we have, and on building the answers to those problems.

In these words, I hope you see an echo of what motivates us here at Microsoft. We are builders, we are tool makers, we work with and through our partners and our customers, we focus on empowerment. It is great to have Marc charge the industry to do more of this.

I do find rhythm in my running, of course. Some days it is slower, some faster, but rhythm carries me forward, foot strike, arm swing, breathe, repeat. On Monday, I read a fantastic essay by Wired editor Nick Thompson about his running. As faithful readers know, Nick is speedy fast, and I’ve had the great experience of running with him a few times, albeit at my pace not his. What I thought was going to be a story about how he got fast by training differently turned out to be that and more, it was also about how the act of running, of training, caused him to reflect on the relationship he had with his father, his grandfather, his family, with sickness and death. It is a fantastic piece of writing, and even if you don’t run at all, it is worth reading. Running is his metronome for life. I feel this.

Rhythm surrounds us in other ways, wherever we are. In song, in the words we read, in poems. A few weeks back Satya referenced a Seamus Heaney poem, which of course made me go back and read some of the works I have by him, and then discover that not only did he write, he wrote about writing (his and others) which lead me to a collection of his essays called “The Government of the Tongue” and back near the end of the book he is writing about T.S. Eliot (and others) and comes to this, built off a letter from Eliot to E. Martin Browne (bold is mine):

Here is the great paradox of poetry and of the imaginative arts in general. Faced with the brutality of the historical onslaught, they are practically useless. Yet they verify our singularity, they strike and stake out the ore of self which lies at the base of every individuated life. In one sense the efficacy of poetry is nil – no lyric has ever stopped a tank. In another sense, it is unlimited. It is like the writing in the sand in the face of which accusers and accused are left speechless and renewed.

Which just stopped me. As a communicator, a scribe, I write, and notate, and speak. But there are times where I wonder…does it matter? Would Andreesen say, I am building, this thing I do? I’ve written about this before, because I believe the answer is yes – the pen matters. Literature matters. Words and stories make life real, they have the ability to change the way we all see the world, to give hope, to share perspective. But I never said it as eloquently as Heaney does here, and then he goes on, looking at the only bible story where Jesus writes (John 8), in the dirt, in front of the scribes and Pharisees who want him to judge a woman (he does not). He springs from this story into a defense again of the power of the word, writing (bold is mine):

Poetry, like the writing, is arbitrary and marks time in every possible sense of that phrase. It does not say to the accusing crowd or to the helpless accused, ‘Now a solution will take place’, it does not propose to be instrumental or effective. Instead, in the rift between what is going to happen and whatever we would wish to happen, poetry holds attention for a space, functions not as distraction but as pure concentration, a focus where our power to concentrate is concentrated back on ourselves. This is what gives poetry its governing power. At its greatest moments it would attempt, in Yeats’s phrase, to hold in a single thought reality and justice. Yet even then its function is not essentially supplicatory or transitive. Poetry is more a threshold than a path, one constantly approached and constantly departed from, at which reader and writer undergo in their different ways the experience of being at the same time summoned and released.

There is so much goodness in these words. In this world now, it can feel like we are marking time. I don’t know about you, but I can struggle to focus, to pay attention to what is happening right now. Concentration can be hard, the dog barks, the phone dings, a new team chat opens. So “our power to concentrate is concentrated back on ourselves”, I love that concept, that push.

On a run in the pouring rain earlier this week I was listening to an old Jackson Browne song, “Farther On” from his 1974 album “Late for the Sky.” It is a song about his pursuit of his dreams, what they cost him, what they cost the ones he loved. You can actually hear him struggle to find his rhythm, to articulate what story he is telling in this poem-like song, when he says:

It was never clear how far or near

The gates to my citadel lay

They were cutting from stone some dreams of their own

But they listened to mine anyway

I'm not sure what I'm trying to say

What am I trying to say, what message do I draw from Andreesen, Thompson, Heaney, T.S. Eliot, Browne just now? We all find our rhythm and our journey in different ways, and finding it is critical – it sustains us and propels us forward. The work we do as communicators (of all sorts!) matters deeply, to us, to Microsoft, to the world. While it can feel at times like we are writing in sand we should heed Heaney’s reminder that we too have the power through our words to leave “accusers and accused left speechless and renewed.”

TGIF! I vote for renewal. ??

fxs