Curios: Glasgow
On the ways we engineer uncertainty out of our lives.
I can be a little cynical about conferences.
There are name badges and lanyards, carefully timed sessions, enormous exhibition halls, networking receptions, and schedules so full that sometimes the most ambitious thing you can do is find the restroom. There is also the self-congratulation and the occasional saviorism that I find distasteful. I keep coming back anyway, and the people are the reason.
A conversation in a hallway. Someone you have known professionally for years who suddenly tells you something real. A person you admire sitting down beside you. A new friendship born of commiseration across the Atlantic. The decision to walk across a room when it would have been easier to stay where you were.
I arrived in Glasgow having packed for a different country and bought a jacket on the second day (due to weather mainly, but also lost luggage), which is the sort of small incompetence I would prefer no student witness.
We ask a great deal of students, and they show real courage in answering. Go somewhere you have never been. Live in a country where you may not understand the language or know how anything works. Introduce yourself to strangers. Ask questions when you are afraid of sounding foolish. We tell them it will help them grow, and it does.
What I usually ask of myself is smaller. Making a phone call you have been putting off. Telling another person that their work mattered to you. Admitting in a room full of experts that you do not know. None of it costs a visa, a degree, or a year away from everyone you love.
The real difference is that retreat is much easier for us. A nineteen-year-old three weeks into a semester in Seoul, surviving off Nabs, does not have quite the same luxury. Neither can a new student starting a Master’s in the United States while adjusting to a new teaching style. Almost every choice I have made since thirty has lowered the odds of feeling like a beginner at work. The longer you work, the less often you are the person in the room who does not know. I have arranged it that way, but then I tell students that not knowing is where the growth is.
Expertise and preparation are rewarded, but so much of what changes us requires stepping into uncertainty.
Conferences concentrate an unusual number of very small borders, the kind between strangers and colleagues, or between admiration and introduction, and they put a deadline on them. Friday, and everyone starts the journey home.
I flew back less cynical than I arrived, and nothing on the program did it. It was the conversations I almost did not start, the ones where I said I did not know something and someone told me. Five days of being slightly out of my depth on purpose, with a return ticket and a new jacket.
We spend the year telling students the discomfort is the point. Glasgow was a week of taking my own advice under unusually favorable conditions.
The harder version starts next week, when nothing at all requires me to be a beginner.
