The Problem of Unwitnessed Decisions

The Institute is good at gatherings. We are good at the table, the observance, the shared task. These are witnessed forms and they work.

But a life is not principally conducted in witnessed forms. It is conducted at 6:40 in the morning, alone, deciding whether to do the thing you said you would do. No steward is present. No record is made. The decision is entirely yours, and the number of such decisions across forty years is not small — it is essentially the whole of it.

Traditions solve this in one of three ways. They install a witness (a god, a conscience, a supervisor). They reduce the number of unwitnessed hours. Or they accept the gap and teach people to live honestly within it.

The Continuance has, on paper, chosen the third. In practice we have drifted toward the second^[1], and I do not think we have discussed this openly enough.

A member who reports everything is not practising continuity. They are outsourcing it. The steward who accepts the report is complicit in the outsourcing and usually enjoys it.

I write this as a steward who has enjoyed it. The correspondence I receive is often more detailed than anything I have asked for, and I have not always sent it back^[2].