Queen for a day

"To bear and not to own; to act and not lay claim; to do the work and let it go: for just letting it go is what makes it stay." Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching / Translation Ursula LeGuinn

“Ok so, after everything we saw so far, you are still not convinced they are employing abusive practices. What will it take for you to get convinced? A body on the floor?” Cheeks flushed, I look into his eyes across the table. We were at the tail end of an evaluation and a potential malpractice was becoming clearer, especially to me. I was the newbie in the room, having joined the company just three months prior, so I didn’t have enough social capital to influence the conclusion that to me was obvious.

One week later, during lunch, a person who had been in the room with us told me: Corina, when you said that I felt I was about to faint, because I had already written my goodbye letter. Two months later the case was successfully closed, the abusive practices and the people who enacted them removed from the company, all of it managed across a fairly politically charged landscape.

Once everything was over, one evening after work, one of my team members jokingly asked me: so is this your leadership style, the hero who swoops in, refuses to be silenced, and saves the day? Maybe we should call you Superwoman. I laughed and said: yes, during the day I am your friendly manager who works collaboratively, and once night comes and the monsters come out I transform into a hero and save the city. I didn’t know back then how accurately that joke described my relationship with authority, nor that it described something narrower than a style, a role I had stopped being able to step out of.

So what did you think of the story? she asks me. We are sitting on a bench in the park, early morning, so it’s just me, her, and the ravens. It’s my favourite so far, I answer, although the ending was weird, didn’t make sense. How come, she presses, because we had been meeting to improve my Dutch through a medium I loved, fairytales and legends, and had been working through Godfried Bomans for a while. Today it was The Little Kingdom.

Well, I say, I loved that the story is about three princes and a king that everyone, including themselves, thinks are stupid. And then it keeps refusing to settle. They keep being put in situations where they do the silly, artless thing, and somehow the silly thing turns out to be exactly right. So are they wise because they choose the foolish thing that happens to be the good thing? Or are they fools who keep stumbling into good consequences? I’d like to think they are a bit of both. Fools are wise because they don’t get caught in social conditioning, they operate from their own compass, and that often makes them the one clear head in the room. And wise people are fools, because wisdom isn’t knowledge, it’s awareness and presence, and learned people have to work even harder to become fools again so that what’s in their heads can turn into wisdom.

You still have not said why you find it a weird ending. she says. Because it ends with the fools inheriting the kingdom of China. They are given power as a reward for wisdom, and that doesn’t make sense to me. If they were really wise they wouldn’t accept power, because power corrupts. I come from a culture where the fairytales always punished the kings and rewarded the wise with peace, tranquillity, and a good life outside the structures of authority. The hero saves the day, supported by the wise counsel of others, and then marries the princess and becomes a king who rules by strength, not wisdom. Again the hero.

Six years between the two stories, the malpractice case and the bench in the park, and I was still stuck in the same play. Bomans had handed me an image of authority I couldn’t recognise as authority at all: fools who build a kingdom, inhabit it, and rule it without ever mistaking the crown for themselves, holding power as lightly as they held everything else. The both/and I admired in the story, wise and foolish at once, was exactly the fluency the ending was rewarding, and I refused it.

I could only see two ways to stand in relation to power. You could be the hero who sweeps in by night, refuses to be silenced, removes the wrongdoers, and protects the wronged, which is to rule by strength. Or you could be the wise one who stays out of it altogether and keeps your peace. The Romanian fairytales had never rewarded a third thing, the wise person who takes the throne and rules well, and so I could not imagine it. It wasn’t disagreement, but a blank where the possibility should have been, a failure of imagination dressed up as a moral position.

And the hero, the only mode of authority I trusted, I didn’t even want. It’s not a position anyone can hold indefinitely; the monsters have to come out for it to have a shape, and most of management is daylight. More than that, the hero puts the spotlight and the whole weight on one person, and I like to do things with others. So I told myself the friendly manager who does everything collaboratively, she must be the wise one. But she was not, she was the hero’s mirror image, and she let me hide better.

Corina, you have to do something about him. You hired him a few months ago, gave him the heaviest project in the department, and he’s useless, he’s messing everything up, his team is fed up, nothing is moving. He just arrived, I reply, we need to give him more patience, and in our one-on-ones he keeps telling me everything’s going great and he doesn’t need help. A few days later the worried messages multiply, from more people. I talk to him again and he admits he’s lost, that the assignment is beyond him. We discuss the options together and at the end of all that careful, collaborative deliberation, I take the entire project onto myself, hand him something minor, and we agree to wait out the clock until his provisional year ends so he has time to find another employer.

The hours that followed were impossible, the team got less of me. The headcount stayed blocked because the role was technically filled, so I couldn’t hire the person we actually needed. Looking back, I doubt very much that I took the wise position. What I did was swing to the far end of the pendulum, away from the hero, and get stuck in a different role entirely.

This is the part I find hard to write, dear reader. The collaboration was not wisdom and it was barely even kindness. It was a hiding place. Every “let’s look at the options together,” every extra month of patience, was a way of never having to occupy the one position I couldn’t bear: the person who makes a judgment about another person and acts on it. A fast, clean exit would have required me to say, with nothing but my own assessment to stand on, you are not right for this, and I am going to act on that. I would rather have worked myself into the ground for a year than say it. The impossible hours weren’t a miscalculation but the price I paid to avoid ruling.

It wasn’t only the absorbing, as when I wasn’t taking work over, I was disappearing from it, stepping back from the team unless they explicitly asked for me, refusing to shape direction because shaping felt like imposing. I called it respect, protecting their agency, trusting their expertise. The result was less coherence, people left to reconstruct from scratch what I could have offered in a sentence, some of them struggling and not asking. Withdrawal and absorption look like opposites, the disappearing manager and the manager who does everything herself, but they’re the same evasion wearing two costumes. Both let me avoid the daylight authority that isn’t heroic and isn’t righteous, the kind that rests on nothing but your own judgment and asks you to wield it anyway.

And there was a deeper symmetry in the two costumes I only saw later. When I absorbed, I acted without ever stopping to ask what the action was costing, action with no reflection underneath it, the hero’s reflex slowed to a year-long grind. When I withdrew, I reflected endlessly, weighed, deliberated, respected, and never let any of it close into a decision, reflection that refused to become action. I had split the two halves of one thing and hidden in each half by turns and neither half alone was the work.

Before lunch

And the strange thing, the thing that should have made the whole cage impossible to build, is that I had already done it. Years before any of this, before I held any formal authority over others, before the malpractice case, before the bench, I am sitting next to a stage waiting for my cue. I hold the smallest brand category, NIVEA Baby, so I get the last slot, right before lunch. I look at them, almost a hundred people, mostly men, all the sales managers from across the country, and I wipe my sweaty hands on my dress and tell myself don’t let them see you’re afraid, and also, remember you have seen almost all of them naked. I start laughing and can’t stop, and that is how I walk on stage, still laughing, until the room goes quiet trying to work out why, and the silence finally cuts through it.

For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Corina, brand manager for NIVEA Baby. Unlike my colleagues I don’t have slides, no financial projections, no distribution targets, no international video. NIVEA Baby is the smallest category we have and you know that better than I do, because you sell all the others too. You know we have thirty percent national distribution. You know that where we are present it’s with one or two products. You know we have no budget for television. So I’m not here to tell you what you already know. I’m here to tell you something else.

And I touch the clicker and the video starts, the one I spent three weeks recording and editing in secret, and on the screen are their own mothers and wives, talking about them as babies, about their babies, about creams on sore feet and powder and naked little bottoms, memories of care arriving in the voices that meant the most to them. A hundred men. The surprise, the disbelief, the tears, the laughter as their baby pictures came up. Fifteen minutes, then silence, then an enormous round of applause.

I had five minutes left before lunch and I used them to talk about how many babies are born in Romania every day, how each one needs a cream and a wipe and a powder and how mothers improvise when the shop doesn’t stock it, how NIVEA Baby was here long before the competition, on their own skin, and how I hoped that with their help more mothers might do the same for the next generation. I could hear my own voice, warm and climbing, the warmth spreading through my chest, their eyes never leaving me. And I felt, dear reader, I felt I had them. Not the room bent to my will, but something moving between all of us at once.

I walked off the stage having just done the exact thing I would spend the next 15 years insisting was impossible, and I didn’t notice it. Because look at what I actually did up there. I refused the slides, the whole formal apparatus of corporate authority, the projections and the targets and the borrowed international footage. I told a room of men they knew more than I did and meant it, handing them their own expertise. And the thing that moved the room was never me, it was them, their mothers, their children, their own lives turned to face them. I did not rule by strength and I did not stay out of it. I built a structure of attention, stepped into it exactly, used it for a purpose, and the power that gathered there did not pile up on me, it circulated.

That was the wise rule. That was the both/and, the fool with no slides who turned out to be the only one in the room saying something true. That was the Bomans prince, inheriting the kingdom and holding it lightly. I had been him once, on a stage, before lunch. And then I forgot it, and went on to build a theory of authority that had no room in it for what I had already done.

Underneath all of it was a belief I had never let myself notice: that no one can hold authority over others with wisdom, that the very attempt is a kind of corruption, and that the only clean thing a person in power can do is protect other people’s freedom by getting out of their way. The hero was permitted because the hero only moves against a clear villain; the righteousness does the justifying. Everything else, the ordinary judgments, the fit of a hire, the direction of a team, felt like power for which I had no permission, and so I either seized it completely or refused it completely. And I held that belief, built my whole practice of management around it, while carrying in my own history the plain evidence that it was false. The capacity had been buried, written over by a story about authority that left no space for the one I had lived.

Arnold Mindell gives this a name. In his work, a role is a position in a field that anyone can step into and out of, and that’s meant to stay fluid: you occupy a role because the situation calls for it, the field shifts, and you step out again. Rigidity is fusion, when a person can no longer separate from a role, or can only ever occupy one or two of them while the rest stay foreclosed. That was me exactly, and it was the thing the Superwoman joke had named without either of us hearing it. I had fused with the hero, and when the hero didn’t fit, which was most of the time, I had only the absorber and the vanisher to fall back on. The problem was never which role I was in. It was that I had lost the fluidity to move between roles according to what the moment actually required, the fluidity I’d had on that stage and then mislaid. I could not build authority for a purpose, use it, and set it down again, because I had stopped experiencing authority as something you take up and put down at all.

Mindell would also have caught the thing I was most proud of. The collaborative, hands-back stance felt like renouncing my rank, flattening myself so the team could rise. But I never actually gave the rank away. I decided to absorb the project. I decided to wait out his contract. I decided to withdraw from the team. He didn’t get a fast exit because I chose that for him; they struggled because I chose to step back. I held every bit of my authority the entire time, I just held it in a way that let me not feel like someone who held it. That is rank rigidity in its purest form, not the absence of power but the inability to wield it consciously. I thought I was protecting their agency but I was protecting myself from the discomfort of using mine.

The cardboard town

I enter the church alongside a hundred strangers. We are going to spend four hours getting to know each other as neighbours and building a town together out of cardboard, leaves and sticks. Ruth cuts a ribbon strung between the now, which is the doorway, and the empty space in front of us waiting to be filled. Welcome to thirty years into the future, she says. Leave the present behind and join me in this new world that wants to be built.

We split into small groups and imagine our street: what we would love about living there, what we want close to us. Then groups merge and we do it again for a neighbourhood, and we draw cafés and playgrounds and a music room and dogs and cats and chickens and birds moving around freely. We walk through each other’s neighbourhoods and get the first glimpse of the shape of the town. Then we split once more and take on the hard structural questions, the ones a town can’t avoid: administration and governance, money, education, the law. My group takes governance. We build a city hall out of cardboard with an open front so citizens can put laws forward and vote on them together, and we decide that anyone can be mayor for a day, because we think it matters that people feel what it is like to hold authority over others. Bit by bit the church fills with structures. Ruth comes back with a cake and declares the town open, and we walk it, hearing the story of each building. And then, at the end, we take it apart. We dismantle the town we just made and come back to the present.

What stays with me from that afternoon is not the cafés or the chickens but the last act, the one nobody resisted: we built the thing, we lived in it, we let someone be mayor, and then we took it down. Nobody mourned the city hall. It had been built for a purpose, it had served the purpose, and the same hands that raised it folded it back into cardboard. I didn’t see it that afternoon, but it was the stage again, before lunch, a structure of attention built and inhabited and set down, only this time a hundred of us were doing it together, and the taking-apart was the part nobody had to be taught.

I found out later that people have actually lived this way, at scale, for as long as we can trace them. In The Dawn of Everything, Graeber and Wengrow spend a long stretch on seasonal variation, the documented fact that many societies ran two completely different social structures across a single year and switched between them on purpose. The nineteenth-century Plains nations, the Cheyenne and the Lakota, for most of the year lived in small, mobile, independent bands with no coercive authority over anyone. But in the season of the buffalo hunt, when a botched move by one impatient hunter could scatter the herd and starve everyone, they did something startling. They appointed a police force and gave it real, total power. These soldiers could give orders, confiscate game taken too early, whip the disobedient, destroy a man’s property, and, if he resisted, kill him. The very same society that in an ordinary murder case would use only moral persuasion turned, for the length of the hunt, into what Lowie called an inexorable state agency. And then the hunt ended, the Sun Dance that followed ended, and they dismantled the whole apparatus. The state they had built dissolved back into anarchic small-band life until the next year.

Graeber insists that they were conscious political actors, fully aware of what authority could do and what it could cost. They knew exactly what they were building and exactly why it was dangerous, which is why they took it apart the moment its season was over. And there is one further thing they did: they rotated it. Whichever clan or warrior society held sovereignty during one hunt would be subject to someone else’s authority the next. This year’s sovereign was next year’s citizen. The belief I had carried for so long, that no one can hold authority over others with wisdom, that the attempt itself is a kind of corruption, met its counter-evidence not in a theory but in a buffalo hunt. The Plains answer to “power corrupts” was not to empty the throne but to sit in it briefly, in full view of its danger, and then to stand up and be ruled by someone else. Corruption was held off not by refusing power but by passing it around.

A hundred strangers in a church reinvented the same gesture in an afternoon with mayor-for-a-day, and never knew they were repeating something whole nations had practised for generations. And I had done a smaller version of it alone, on a stage, before lunch, fifteen years before I had the words for any of it. One practice, at three sizes: a single person finding the fluidity for an hour, a room of strangers finding it for an afternoon, whole nations holding it across generations. The scale changes everything and nothing. It is the same act each time, build what the season demands, hold it consciously, take it down when the season turns, and trust the next season to build it again. Fluidity was never only a thing that happens inside one person. It is something a person, a room, and a nation each have to practise, and keep practising, because none of them get to hold it once and keep it.

Keep dismantling, keep building

The temptation, always, is to find the right structure and keep it: the kinder hierarchy that never has to change, or its mirror image, hierarchy dissolved for good so no one holds power over anyone again. These are the hero and the absorber from the first half of this essay, grown to the size of a whole imagination, both arguing about the same wrong question, which structure is the right one to keep forever. The rotation that freed me, the buffalo police, the mayor for a day, was never an answer to that question but a refusal of it. The thing worth carrying is not any particular arrangement but the willingness to keep building arrangements at all: to make the structure a season needs, inhabit it, watch honestly what it does, and take it down when it no longer fits.

This is what Freire called praxis: not action alone and not reflection alone, but the two bound together, action taken and then reflected on, the reflection reshaping the next action. He warned that action without reflection collapses into blind activism, and reflection without action into mere talk, and that only their union transforms anything. I had lived both failures by turns and called them a style. The hero is all action, sweeping in without reflection. The withdrawing manager is all reflection, deliberating forever and never picking up the weight of a single decision. The craft is the loop between them, run again and again: you build, you hold it with your eyes open, you watch what it does to the room and to you, and you let what you learn reshape what you build next. That loop is how fluidity is grown rather than merely admired. It is not a stance you locate once but a practice that deepens each time you run it, and goes slack the moment you stop.

I am still learning this, and expect to be for the rest of my working life, because the pull of the poles never lets go. But the capacity was never one to learn once and have. The Plains nations didn’t hold it by perfecting it; they held it by doing it again every season, in full view of its danger, and handing it on to whoever sat in the seat next. None of it stays found. That is the only thing I am sure of now, dear reader: the practice is not a structure you arrive at but one you keep making, alone and together, building and unbuilding with the same hands, so that whoever sits where you sit next finds the capacity still warm, and picks it up, and learns again that it has to be made.

Photo by Phillip Flores on Unsplash