Pest in my mirror

~ I’d met this problem before

Musings … my thoughts, every day since March 20, 2003 …

A critic might say today’s column risks sounding a bit pleased with itself, with my own self-awareness-growth, and that the clients I’m writing about might be seen as metaphorical anecdotes to construct a neat moral fable - but that’s not the case, these are not made-up people and the shedding light on yesterday’s happenings is not easy to face, write about or discuss. But, it seemed important to do this ...

Two of me walked into a bar ...

~ wait for the punch line, please - this isn’t funny

Some lessons arrive dressed as annoyance, then turn out to be autobiography.

Yesterday, as I worked through my reaction and an action ~ in two separate situations/relationships (the only common factor was … me), I discovered that one of the people irritating me most was, inconveniently, me.

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No joke. Yesterday, two versions of me showed up for work.

One had already had enough of a client and was prepared to cut the cord.

The other sat down to send yet another follow-up note to a slower-moving client, chasing decisions, paperwork, and money that had been drifting just out of reach for months.

Then it arrived - that small, rude flash of recognition.

In one corner, I was muttering about somebody else’s persistence.

In the other, I was manufacturing more of it.

Nothing sharpens self-awareness quite like hearing your own knock on somebody else’s door.

It was less like a serious breakthrough than it was a middle-aged ambush by my own reflection.

I wrote him (the second guy) differently after that.

Not as a tactic.

Not as some clever sales technique move dressed up as humility.

I told him, in effect, that I’d realized I had probably become a pest in his inbox, the very species I’d been privately cursing elsewhere - poking, pushing, properly following up but in a way that annoys and could harm an otherwise really worthwhile relationship.

I told him I would stop knocking on his door …

If there were business to be done at some point, later, fine.

If not, also fine.

To my surprise, he came back with a quick reply - an apology, an explanation, and a better tone - then a useful result.

But that wasn’t the real point.

The real point is an uglier issue, harder to look at - and it was me!

I wonder - for myself, and maybe this is true for others who might read this:

How often do we defend our own behaviour until inconvenience flips the mirror around?

You, me, and many of us, I suppose.

Principle can sound and feel noble right up to the moment it interferes with our schedule, our one-way view of a situation.

I believe, and hope, that I grow a little each time I recognize that what offends me most may simply be myself arriving at an important point I’ve visited before, but seeing it from a different direction.

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