Failure as a human being and as a leader. The curse of self-awareness.
When I was young, I had a strange experience. One that would probably have had me on medication or sectioned in a therapeutic home if I’d lived in the US and told an adult. But one that was absolutely real to me, as I experienced it.
I was about ten or eleven years old, in the summer between primary six and seven. I was staying over at my dad’s house in Glasgow, unable to sleep in the hay feverish season of late sunshine and early dawns.
I sat up from under the covers, as a white ‘line’ of light moved across the room, from the bookcases at the far wall. It was a perfectly straight line of light, which moved exactly parallel with the room, sweeping across smoothly to pass over my body, and my head. It was like I’d been scanned in a photocopier, which came from nowhere but occupied the entire space.
I couldn’t figure out what it was. It was linear and did not ‘bend’ or change angle when passing. It could not have been a light from a car headlamp because I was sleeping on the fold-out sofa bed in the living room, which backed onto the garden. The garden backs onto another garden and is accessible only through the house. The only road is beyond the other house, uphill slightly and far away. Besides, the light was unbroken. It was not interrupted by the walls of the buildings outside, nor the walls inside.
A continuous beam of light.
What on earth could have been the source of this light? What did it do? There was no noise, and I couldn’t feel anything. But it wasn’t nothing.
I sat awake for a long time, until exhaustion brought me to unconsciousness.
We then went on holiday up to the Isle of Lewis for a couple of weeks and had a great time. I didn’t think much of the light beam until I returned home at the summer’s end. I would suffer the strangest déjà vu after that summer, for years afterwards. I would constantly dream of events, and they would happen months later.
I was deeply confused when my subscription to Star Trek magazine came, and it was about 10 edition numbers behind where I thought it was in the sequence. My other 10-year-old Trekkie friends didn’t agree or seem to notice the repetition of old material in the magazine that I was sure had come out in previous editions. I must have been mistaken.
I then became suspicious of my mother, who could not remember the names of things or people that I had spoken to her about before the summer holiday. I became convinced for a while she’d been replaced by a stranger or an android. Something I now know is classed as a diagnosable mental illness. Thankfully, when I confronted her about the ‘mistakes’ she’d been making, she satisfied me it was her poor memory or lack of attention that had gotten me worried over nothing.
These days I’m not so sure.
Part of me looks back on that moment and thinks that I swapped places that night. That now I live in an alternate universe to the one I was born into.
What else could explain the way the world is today? I must be in a parallel universe. Surely?
It doesn’t worry me. I think, if such a thing is possible, then that could have been what happened to me. If so, then I’m sure there was a reason for that. If not, then my brain is a more mysterious and entertaining place than I previously imagined.
Does it mean I can assume that my life has a purpose? A divine path?
Proverbs 19:21 ESV Many are the plans in the mind of a man, but it is the purpose of the Lord that will stand.
I cannot prove anything or claim to know such things. I don’t even hope for them. I have kept this story secret from everyone but my brother for decades. At this point, I’m sharing it with internet strangers because I feel like now, we live in a world of such unreal evil and nihilism, I feel that I just have to speak. Whether people think I’m crazy or not. We now live in the relativist age of ‘my truth,’ and well, here is mine. Narcissistic conceit? Maybe.
I used to have such an instinct in me. Premonitions came to me all the time. My instincts and emotions were clear and strong. Alas, 15 years of work, higher education and generally keeping busy have taken those feelings from me. I no longer feel the presence of ghosts or our ancestors like I used to.
I’m writing now because I feel I have to. Is that possession? Or inspiration?
The only thing that speaks to me in that non-verbal way anymore is my dreams. And weirdly I dream in visual puns and symbolism. Silver medals, in the eternal, internal, race to nowhere.
Thinking in a symbolic way means you can’t enjoy anything. For example, this week I watched the conclusion of Ozark, on Netflix. In the final episode the Byrd’s Jonah, kills the metaphorical Jonah – the private detective who abandoned his conscience, while he clutches the ashes of the murdered brother in a ‘Baphomet’ cookie jar. Dressed in pure white, Ruth (a biblical name that means love), is murdered, leaving the Byrds, Ruthless. The story ends with a nihilistic conclusion that the world belongs to those who exercise Nietzschean will to power ethics and always has. The inversion of the two Jonah characters is boring, and stark at the same time.
(The use of inversion in our modern propaganda is worth keeping in mind at all times, by the way. That’s how predatory people occupy territory in your mind. By filling it with inversions of the good, and making you pay attention to the wrong things.)
The only thing I can enjoy about Netflix these days is the salty tears of their woke staff, who are no longer able to bully their managers as completely as they have been in recent years. Yet, the Satanism remains.
How can a mere peasant (sorry, sea captain and father of three) like me make the world a better place, in the face of billion-dollar companies in league with Satanists, nihilists and propagandists of a Malthusian agenda?
What possible path can I walk that will actually make things better, and not just be an exercise in stroking my own ego?
As a person in a leadership position at sea, you have moments that just make you stop. Moments where there is nothing to do but listen and absorb. Like when an officer confides in you, his marital problems, and his financial worries. Or trusts you with secrets. Or when you see him at his lowest point, weak, blinded, and wretched.
Seeing grown men in tears, naked, drunk or otherwise shameful happens. It is as much a part of being at sea on a cargo ship these days, as it was when Noah’s children found him rolling around pissed-up and naked in his tent after the ordeal of the flood. Some things are eternal. We’ve all been there.
When I was younger, I had an ego and testosterone-driven motivation to seek out a leadership rank. As the oldest male child in a divorced family, the cub scouts, the boys brigade, the army cadets and the Naval Reserves at Uni all provided the surrogate models of masculinity that I craved. But after 18 years of going to sea (on and off), and years in a management position ashore, I have absolutely freed myself from any love of the power that a position of authority may have previously enticed me with.
I see bad leaders and careless leaders, and I have sailed and worked with absolute tyrants. And I’ve sailed with brilliant leaders, who were too humble to even call themselves leaders. I’ve been subordinate to, or outranked, paedophiles, criminals and actual Nazi-lovers. And I’ve had to deal with each of them as professionally and courteously as I could.
It has been humbling. It has also been worrying, and downright terrifying at times. It would be easy to conclude that we are a species unworthy and incapable. We should probably never have bothered learning to read and write and should really just give up on this little ‘blip’ we call civilisation. But I haven’t given up yet.
Now, my motivation as a leader is to occupy my position with care. It is my responsibility to occupy this station with greater concern for ethics and honour, than the other people who might replace me. It is my job to earn the trust and faith of those who look to me to occupy this rank with leadership qualities.
I have failed many people, in many ways. I have said cruel and careless things to people. Spoken behind their backs. Made fun of people who had done me no harm. I’ve been prideful, arrogant, and aggressively judgemental. Competence and confidence in some areas, lead to overconfidence in other areas. My mistakes have at times narrowly missed causing serious damage and injury.
Lots of people hate me for the way I used to be, and I don’t blame them.
But you live and you learn, hopefully. Becoming the Master of a vessel has taught me that I shouldn’t take sides for or against the people in my ship’s company. You are Captain to everyone on board, whether you like them or not. The poor performers and the unfortunate souls in your company need you. They need you just as much as everyone you favour.
I have done and said things that have led to people being fired and made redundant. I don’t know if those people really deserved it, looking back. Or if poor communication and poor relationships meant that those outcomes were inevitable.
I always thought I’d live a life with no regrets.
Youth allows such naivety, but leadership does not.
I’ve been dreaming a lot about ‘backing people up,’ recently. My dreams are filled with images of unfinished work, like memory sticks withdrawn before the files are fully saved. Moving house, while in the middle of decorating. Selling my deceased uncle’s car by an accidental click of an app on my phone, then awakening before I could buy it back.
I now view all of my relationships in the workplace as an unfinished trust exercise. The kind where you’re supposed to lean back and let your partner catch you. Except, that everyone is always falling. And I have no firm place to stand.
My nature is to be a problem solver. The one who acts. The one who leads by example. The first to get his hands dirty, and the last to quit.
But now, I am in a situation where endurance needs to be everlasting. Where the mistakes are slowly passing by, under the surface of acceptability. Visible only when they’ve passed by. The consequences of my failures are potentially life-ending, and life-ruining.
I have no solution for the officer who confided in me recently. I looked him in his tearful eyes, hopefully with sympathy, but with no words for him. He breaks eye contact and goes to his cabin. We speak again, in pieces, over days, hushed tones in quiet corners. He works hard overall, and I forgive his mistakes. He thanks me. We build a little trust. I solve nothing. Except, perhaps, for his excessive worry that I might report him to the company for not performing his duty as normal.
Everything takes longer than you think.
Sometimes ‘leadership’ involves tolerating failure. Soemtimes it requires the opposite. Knowing the difference requires trust. Trust takes time to build.
Confession and contrition make me more comfortable with my decision to forgive. Is that my Christian bias, or a lesson well learned from millenia of ancestral wisdom?
I live in the faith that I will do more good than harm. I accept, with scant evidence, that my contribution to this group of men will serve the greater good in the long run. On my tiny little cargo ship, in the back of beyond in Northeast Scotland.
Am I doing enough?
What else can I do?
I used to have a Christian friend at Uni, whose faith annoyed me to no end. ‘I trust in God’s plan for me, he would say in a way that just irritated me.
I get it now, though. Following the compass of truth, love, virtue, and forgiveness may take you to places you never thought you would go. That kind of journey is internal as well as external. It has crew, and passengers coming and going along the way. When the destination is abstract, the route must be taken in faith. Holding fast, or adjusting course, is equally a matter of ethical and rational discernment.
I know I’m not making things worse. Not as much as I used to. Not as much as others I have seen in my position. I pray I’m making things better. And I move on to another day, where my actions are inadequate, but sure enough, move us all forward. A little.
I think that is what faith is, don’t you?
Occupying our place in the world, with knowledge of the good and evil in everything we do, and sacrificing our life’s work toward putting more in the ‘good’ column, than the ‘bad’ column?
Ephesians 2:8-9 ESV For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.