It’s the teeth,

they sink in

they never let go,

not till you stop;

you let them consume you

or you hunt them down,

grab hold of the fangs,

and pull them out

slowly

to the older lady sharing news that she is dying

with her young friend at the table next to me

what words are better than yours?

“Hold me accountable and don’t let me get all crying and that shit”

what feelings are better than yours, and whose courage greater?

you beautiful and balding in our stylish Starbucks talking about dividing assets with your beloved

so in the end it’s easier on everyone else;

may I care as much as you when I face my end.

I love you now… you did this, though we will never meet again;

now I’m off to my meeting and it seems so small.

may you ride glorious with the sun…go well but not gently…

at night
i pray for a light
to illuminate my sleep;
i pray for a star
to guide me in the deep
that i might find myself
washed upon the western shore
and not vanished to the chasm

in the not cold sunlight
of a not warm lunch-hour
sitting at a picnic table
I can hear the snow melting.

it falls in bits to wet snow below
making small, short ‘SPLISH’ noises
intermittently like an insect

and I think to myself
that the world has changed in many impermanent ways
but this… this sun, this sky, this breeze that shakes the dry leaves…

this never changes
and I am thankful to travel through it –
the finite through this imminent eternity

what do you do
when your love for someone
boils away
in the heat of the noonday sun?

what’s left
is the black and killing smoke
remnant tendrils
invade your throat and choke

what do you do
when your love for someone
boils away
in the heat of the noonday sun?

fall down
that you might burst into flames
and pray
that the sky pours forth its rains

how do you stop
your love for someone
boiling away
in the heat of the noonday sun?

you stand,
woven together arm in arm,
enflamed against some outside harm
your heart’s own light sure to disarm

the days fly away as ash from a fire,
drifting, spiraling up with the night breeze
things that once were, now burned away
small pieces of nothing, once something.

the days fly away as ash from a fire,
fuel for bright raging life now spent
bits of absence carried to the stars
too small to notice where they go.

the days fly away as ash from a fire,
lost to the four corners and beyond,
once alive with verdant possibility
now consumed by the light it brought.

We have all experienced the phenomnon of narrowing bandwidth – that time, either momentary or ongoing, where your needs outpace your resources.

The parent of three children can relate. Most times maybe things are ok. But then there are rare occassion where the stars align and boom – suddenly everything is chaos.

Parent is making dinner, one child is reading, the other playing games on her phone and the third is crawling around a slew of toys on a blanket within sight. Partner decides he needs to go out for milk. In partner’s absence, child one trips and falls down the stair, child two’s phone dies and she is in a panic while child three has suddenly had her diaper mysteriously come off and proceeds to gleefully pee on the floor.

There are a lot of potential responses to this -most of them poor. Parent decides to triage and runs to aid injured child assuming the floor can be cleaned later while shouting to child two to “HOLD ON ON MINUTE” and eventually life goes on.

These sorts of things happen in organizations all of the time and leadership needs to be able to navigate these moments so that they remain moments and not ongoing circumstance.

When bandwidth narrows and things pile up people often have an interesting response – they remain silent and try to keep up. Why? We do not want to appear incapable and so we keep trying to do more until suddenly something breaks and we quit. Managers need to be aware of this tendency and why is occurs.

A manager needs to ensure employees are aware that when they feel bandwidth narrowing their first task is to come to them. Management then tries to determine the cause –

1. Increasing organizational needs on single employee are pushing them beyond their ability to keep up.
2. Nothing has changed but employee’s skillset cannot manage the job.

At this point management needs to determine the correct/first response (triage). Do you train the individual? Do you increase bandwidth by adding staff? Do you remove the individual and rehire to the role? Or do we scale back and choose to not do certain things for the time-being (manage the growth)?

If these things are not done an interesting circumstance can occur – narrow bandwidth can become an excuse for maintaining narrow bandwidth.

To put it another way – staff are so overwhelmed with additional tasks due to narrowing bandwidth they no longer have the time to mitigate the issue through hiring.

When this happens pressure in the organization builds, people quit, bandwidth narrows further, hiring slows down even more as staff seek to catch up rather then fill gaps, and the cycle continues until structural or organizational collapse occurs.

The irony is this is not a difficult cycle to break but it requires leadership and decision making. Employees need managers to rescue them from a culture of fear and frustration by enforcing deadlines and requiring certain decisions to be made that focus on mitigating the bandwidth issue – having existant staff pick up the slack of narrowing bandwidth is not the solution and often feeds the cycle itself by driving them away.

In the end the solution lies in breaking a cycle of paralyzed indecisiveness and forging ahead so that key objectives can start being met again and the organizing can begin functioning like the well-oiled machine it was always meant to be.