Here's the hard part: You gotta start where ever they start. You can't start where you know this is going, because you aren't there yet. And you can't insist that the relationship, which could only develop from digging out from naive beginnings, already be THERE at the very beginning. Can't do that without falling down a rabbit hole. That you know where this is going --- that's irrelevant now. Hush up. Start where ever they are. Travel with them to where you might go together. The journey's the thing. Gotta start at the beginning, not the end.

Do not mention that the end envisioned will not be the end achieved. Never has been before. Unlikely to be this time. Each engagement starts as half truth and half promise, like we know the future from the start. We must move through our lives with confident strides, just as if we knew stuff, just as if we controlled our hearts. Otherwise, our hearts could never become enchanted along the way with what we never anticipated.

Let the management-ist be. I have spent the last few weeks describing the secular religion of management-ism only to learn that I must accept these people as they are, because that's how they are. It's not MY job to reform them --- or to show them the supposed error of their ways. Or to guide them to the path of whatever passes for righteousness in MY book. That would be suspiciously similar to the driving I complain about THEM doing. It matters not even a little bit whether you or they are an SOB or an angel. And who you are today matters even less than who we might become together tomorrow.

More ... next time.