Personal essays
On not contributing to a meeting
Quakers
One of the common ways that Quakers worship is in an unprogrammed meeting.
Members come together and sit in silence until one of them receives a message they wish to share with others.
Not everyone will share and there will be days where noone will share. The congregation will sit in silence for an hour.
The urge to say something, to lead, can take many forms. The site quaker.org explains, it might be “a thought that won’t go away, no matter how much they try to set it aside”. They also note that there’s at least as many reasons to speak as there are people there.
What I like most of all is the guidance that what you say must be more important than the silence you are breaking.
The urge
This rule of Quaker meetings popped into my head this morning as I thought about a meeting I went to yesterday and so many meetings like it before.
Yesterday’s meeting was fairly small. There were only five of us. I was asked to start the meeting and explain our goals.
I explained that we were beginning a project and wanted two of the guests to help us determine what they did and didn’t want to be part of the project.
I was more specific than that but it isn’t important to this story.
But I used a phrase that had meaning to me that one of the experts objected to immediately. He explained why he didn’t want us to use that as our guiding principle.
I should have said nothing and just nodded and thanked him.
Instead I explained that I’d misspoke and I actually agreed with him.
It contributed nothing.
My silence would have been better than the space my response contributed.
Noticing
It’s actually easier to notice in others than in ourselves.
The meeting got going and we were bouncing ideas off each other and making real progress honing the topics for the project.
I encouraged another person to speak who’d been trying to get in for a while. He introduced himself, said how long he’d been working at the company, and explained which projects he’d been working on.
You could feel the momentum go out of the meeting.
It’s hard. Unlike a Quaker meeting, an ordinary meeting is filled with people saying things and you can feel that you have to get in there and contribute.
You don’t.
Before you unmute your microphone at a virtual meeting or speak out at an in-person meeting, as if what you’re about to say is more important than staying silent.
Essay from Dim Sum Thinking Newsletter 280. Read the rest of the Newsletter or subscribe