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Fast Forward

I met F through a mutual connection who thought it might be interesting for us to network given our professional backgrounds and interests. F was pretty upset when I needed to reschedule last minute. I gave him a pass given he is older than my father - and he is a career academic. Not the kind of person who deals with having the whole world stomping on their calendar and needing to fight for personal time. Maybe something he did not need to deal with in the course of his career. I did not have a good feeling about this meeting but second guessed myself and decided to meet him anyway. 

F turned out to be a person who stopped being curious about things a while back but based on years of practice had muscle memory to respond correctly to new information and opinions that contradicted his own (I had plenty of those) in our short conversation. I wondered why our mutual connection had decided this would be a good learning experience for us both. I can learn something from talking to just about anyone - always have. Maybe my bar was too high for F given his extensive resume and age. I might have been hoping for a nugget of wisdom that would have clarified the many confusions of my life. 

None of that happened and judging by the flow of conversation, it is unlikely further engagement would yield those results. F insisted that I watch a short video he had set to music that helps explains his current avocation. He insisted that we do it while on the call so trying to be polite I acquiesced. That musical presentation had the vibe of something from forty years ago - perhaps that point in time when F became incapable of incorporating anything new to his repertoire despite having good intention. He was incredibly proud of his production and I did not have the heart to tell him that what I thought of it. 

After the call, I had to take pause and think about what lay ahead for me - this could me a few decades out, untethered from the reality of the day, living in my la-la land, imagining that I am still at the top of the game when the world has moved so far that no one knows what game I am even talking about. F is luckily not blessed with much self-awareness or insecurity about his place in the world - I may have a bit too much of both which will make things worse I suppose. 

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