The Last Quarter

Nearly everything I have failed at, I failed at in the last quarter. This is not a confession of weakness so much as a description of how attention actually decays. The early part of a task is performed for an audience — even if the audience is only the person who agreed to do it. The last part is performed for nobody, in worse light, by someone tired.

The houses are organised around this fact. The rota is not a list of tasks; it is a device for producing witnesses to the unwitnessed part. Somebody sees you carry the last four buckets. That is the whole mechanism, and it is embarrassing how well it works.

A practice is not what you undertake. It is what remains being done after the undertaking has stopped feeling like anything.

I have been thinking about this since the fire at the Shore House, and about the eleven days afterwards when the kitchen ran out of a schoolroom and nobody wrote anything down. We finished the winter. I could not tell you who decided any of it.

The stewardship will hold its continuity review in the spring and I expect to be asked what was learned. I will say: that finishing is a collective faculty and not a private virtue, and that we should stop praising individuals for it. I will say it whether or not the review is minuted, which it will not be.