Reliability Is Not Predictability

Thursday morning, coffee with Stephanie Ruhle on Money Power Politics. Ruhle is interviewing Chrystia Freeland, the former deputy prime minister of Canada. She is releasing her newest book in October, Unreliable Boyfriend: An Insider’s View of Dealing with a Chaotic Superpower, Plutocrats, and Other Complicated People.

“Unreliable boyfriend” is one of those metaphors that works before you have time to think about it. You know the type: he makes promises, he means them when he makes them, then something happens. Plans change, you adjust.

A couple hours later, I was at the surgeon’s office. She stopped the antibiotic, which was the good news. I was also supposed to have laser treatments on both feet — one for the foot recovering from surgery and one for the tendonitis that has developed in the other. Somehow, that part had not made it onto the schedule.

They could squeeze me in. The problem was that I was supposed to meet my teaching team, and somewhere in my carefully planned Thursday, there had also been lunch at my favorite Chinese place.

The Chinese place was the first casualty.

I texted the grad students: situation at the surgeon’s, running late, I’ll be there no later than 2:15. Then I had both feet lasered, got in the car, stopped at McD’s, wolfed down a double cheeseburger (no pickles — they make me burp), and made it to the meeting eight minutes late. Eight minutes. I felt triumphant!

The day is not over. Tonight is the first meeting of my redesigned graduate seminar. I have a plan, of course. We’ll spend the first half of the evening forming community, talk about structure of the course and the new comprehensive portfolio, and if the evening behaves itself, play around with fire and volcanos.

The evening will not behave itself. At least I hope it doesn’t.

The first night of class is another kind of promise. Here is where we say we are going. Here is what I think we will do. Here are the assignments, the readings, the dates, the carefully arranged sequence of things. A syllabus: an organized argument for chaos.

And then the students arrive. It’s the end of the first week of classes for them — they’ve already taken two of their three courses. They bring their own schedules, histories, questions, anxieties, enthusiasms, and emergencies. Someone says something in the icebreaker that opens I door I hadn’t planned walking through. A discussion takes forty minutes instead of twenty. An exercise falls flat or become more interesting. The course starts becoming ours, not mine.

Maybe the distinction I’ve been circling all day is reliability is not the same as predictability. The surgeon’s office was not predictable, nor was my lunch.

Tonight I walk into another room and make another set of promises. Not everything will go according to plan, but I’ll show up, pay attention, adjust as necessary as the people in the room take us somewhere I did not expect.

Maybe that’s what makes someone reliable after all.