Momentum and Meaning
Flow, Stillness & Courage
I walked back to the river today. It wasn’t the same river, of course—it never is—but it remembered enough of me to nod. The mountain behind it didn’t move, and in that refusal there was a kindness I have not always given myself. I stood between them, a little older, a little quieter, and listened.
The hardest lesson in leadership is not how to move people, but how to let them move without you.
The river likes ambition. It speaks in verbs—carve, cut, rush, become. The mountain prefers nouns—ground, boundary, home. I have spent years worshipping the verbs, and then a season kneeling before the nouns. Both were necessary. Neither was sufficient.
Silence is not the absence of words; it is the grammar of trust.
The Season of Flow
There was a time I believed speed cured doubt. If a decision hurt, make three more decisions quickly and outrun the ache. Water loves a shortcut. I measured days by throughput and nights by the glow of dashboards. The river indulged me: it handed me new channels when old ones clogged, and it taught me to weave between stones that called themselves “policy” or “process.”
Some of those stones were real; some were excuses. A few were guardians I mistook for obstacles.
I learned that flow is not chaos. The river is disciplined. It keeps a ledger in silt: every eddy, debit; every current, credit. When it floods, it is not angry—it is precise. It takes only what the valley borrowed in unseasonable abundance. The river’s mathematics is patient.
And yet, even the best current can forget where it’s going.
The Discipline of Standing
When I finally looked up, the mountain hadn’t moved an inch—but I could see that it had changed. Winter had written scars across its shoulders; summer had stitched them with green. Standing is not doing nothing. Standing is a practice.
The mountain taught me to hold a meeting without speaking first, to ask a question and let it land like snowfall, to measure trust by how long a room can sit with a problem before anyone reaches for bravado. It taught me to replace “What’s the answer?” with “What did we learn in the search?” and to treat pace as a design choice, not a personality trait.
If flow is confidence, standing is courage.
There is a courage that looks like stillness: the strength to not rescue a task that belongs to someone else; the faith to let a young engineer break something small to learn something big; the grace to own the thing you broke without hiding behind strategy-speak.
The Valley Between
The valley—where people live—doesn’t need a zealot for water or a priest for stone. It needs a translator. This is the work I am learning to love: to bring a river’s adaptability into a mountain’s reliability; to hold a team with the stability of granite, and then loosen my grip so their flow finds the sea I cannot see yet.
Three practices keep me honest:
- Name the current. When a decision is fast, say why. When it is slow, say why. Ambiguity is where fear breeds.
- Surface the stones. Write down the constraints we pretend are inevitable. Decide which are bedrock and which are merely heavy.
- Measure by learning. Outcomes matter; so does the delta in understanding. Celebrate when the metric moves, and celebrate again when the model improves even if the number doesn’t—yet.
The river corrects by movement; the mountain corrects by perspective.
On Trust (and the Grammar of Silence)
I used to think trust meant promising not to fail. Now I think trust is promising to tell the truth about failure quickly enough for the team to remain whole. The grammar of that promise is silence: not the mute kind, but the listening kind—the silence that makes room for a junior voice to finish a sentence without your seniority stepping on it.
I have learned to schedule silence. In a world of calendars that wolf down daylight, I block out time to not decide. The river inside me protests; the mountain smiles. In that pause, I hear what the valley already knows.
We do not become trustworthy by never erring; we become trustworthy by never hiding.
The Work of Repair
There are days when the river inside me stumbles into flood and I say too much. There are days when the mountain inside me calcifies into pride and I say too little. On those days, repair is the work: not an apology as punctuation, but an apology as architecture—a bridge, not a period.
A good bridge is specific: Here is where I stepped on your sentence. Here is the process I will change so it doesn’t happen again. A good bridge is public enough to restore the commons and private enough to honor the person. A good bridge is maintained—checked in a month, again in a quarter—until the river beneath it flows clear.
Returning
Evening came. The river darkened into a ribbon of ink; the mountain put on the first stars like epaulettes. I thought about the leaders I admire. None of them are pure river or pure mountain. They are valley-makers. They hold paradox long enough for it to turn into practice.
Tomorrow, I will return to rooms where budget lines sound like cliffs and deadlines like monsoon. I will try again to bring water to stone and stone to water. I will miss it some days. I will mend it the next.
Flow when it serves. Stand when it saves. Learn always.
When I finally turned to go, the mountain didn’t say goodbye; it said “We’ll see.” The river laughed and said “We’ll see soon.” Between them, I felt less like a person with answers and more like a person with direction.
That is enough for tonight.