In
the opening act of “1776,” the Broadway musical, the new delegate from Georgia
to the Continental Congress, a Dr. Lyman Hall, on his first day, enters the
meeting room where the fate of the colonies is to be decided within the coming
month, only to find the room almost empty and no sign of the session having
been called to order. The doctor, having
understood the meeting time to be 10:00 am, asks the custodian if this
information is correct, to which the custodian replies in the affirmative. Well, then, where is everybody, he asks, it
already being many minutes past the hour.
“Oh, they’ll be strolling in pretty soon,” the custodian answers. Hall is struck by the matter-of-factness in
the custodian’s reply, signifying that the regulation regarding 10:00 is one
honored more in the breach than in the observance. Business as usual! Late!
The fact of the matter is that all the delegates are either already in
the building in various nooks and crannies or on their way somewhere around the
corner. In fact, business is already
being transacted, as the delegates feel each other out on crucial issues such
as (oh, yes) Independence.
In
1966 I traveled to Washington with three other ministers, it being our intent
to get ourselves more up to date on reforms being proposed in the legislatures
and various other matters, and the highlight of our stay in our nation’s
capital for me was our visit to the Senate building and sitting in the gallery
to watch deliberations. Sen. Everett
Dirksen, Republican Minority Leader at the time, was on the floor, and another
senator whose name I never learned was expounding his views on the Vietnam
situation. In other words, he had the
floor – a floor populated at that moment by just about nobody. He was talking to mostly empty chairs, and
even Dirksen was in private discussion with somebody else and not listening to
the man. The speaker seemed content
simply to know that his words were being read into the record. If “1776” is to any valid degree authentic,
we have to conclude that the style in which government business is conducted
has not changed drastically over the two centuries.
As
best I understand it, much (though far from all) of the business in Congress is
conducted off the floor anyhow. Many
deals are made, many compromises, many decisions are finalized, coalitions
formed, off the floor or in committee.
Most of the “arm-twisting” that Lyndon Johnson did to get the votes he
needed for the passage of the Civil Rights Act took place in hallways or in
back rooms or even over the telephone.
By the time the delegates all get into their seats, much has often
already been finalized. The proceedings
are simply a matter of formality, when the cards are turned over so to speak
for everyone at the card table to read them.
Business
as usual! Late by the clock, but not
necessarily too late to fulfill an agenda!
In
civilian society, not many are extended this kind of luxury. Punctuality must be far better enforced, or
else all is chaos, and commerce and industry and executive transaction
falter. Not many employers are tolerant
of lateness to work among their employees.
Showing up when and where directed can make the crucial difference with
those efficiency ratings. When it comes
to our private lives, punctuality can do much to preserve friendships that
might otherwise be wrecked by the habitual tardiness of one of the persons
involved. How many of us have been
annoyed by having to wait for someone who said they would be at the restaurant
by 8:00, only to have them stroll in at 8:30 with the vaguest of excuses? In volunteer work, when an individual’s
services are counted on to go into motion at a specific time, with needy people
waiting for them, those in charge do not have recourse to the same pressures
that an employer can exert to bring someone on the payroll to heel. Let’s face it -
Showing
up late in most domains constitutes dishonesty, the failure to keep one’s word.
All
of us are late to something occasionally, due to honest human error – a miscalculation of the time maybe. Or there might be the intervention of a delay
factor not foreseeable and not of our making or a frail body that cannot always
be counted on to move at a preferred speed!
(I am learning fast about that in my eighty-second year.) And then there is a little phenomenon called
an emergency. Of course we have to be
straight about the fact that not everything in this world called an emergency
is one. In fact, most are not. If I am late for a scheduled meeting and upon
late arrival give as my reason that I had to drive a friend to work first, that
is not an emergency; that is poor planning, the failure to get priorities
straight in my head, something so many of us are too proud to admit that we can
fail at. How did I think I could do both
in the same morning, afternoon or evening?
Nothing gets mistaken for emergency more in this world than the results
of poor planning. But granted,
arriving late cannot always be prevented, not even for those of us who are
religious about being on time.
What
gums up the social workings mainly are the habitually tardy, and it is about
them that I wish to vent a little now.
During my pastorate in a northern town many years ago there was a fellow
clergyman – let’s call him by the alias Fred – who could almost never be
counted on for promptness. It was
nothing unusual for his deacons to have to get a service started or delay it
many minutes waiting for him to show up.
Counseling sessions, business meetings, youth fellowships, regional
conferences, baptisms – nothing was off limits for him. He was so much in the habit of late arrivals
that he earned the nickname among everyone who knew him The Late Freddy
Foster. I was not around after he died
many years later, but it would not surprise me if his gravestone read The Late
Late Freddy. An extreme example, but not
an unheard of one!
I
offer a maxim that I dare anyone to disprove or refute. This is it: All habitually tardy people are
habitually tardy for the exact same reason. Whatever the circumstances, whatever the
occasion, whatever the subject of convocation, whatever its reason or purpose,
this maxim applies. Those who you can
count on to be late showing up are late for the same reason – always. No exceptions! That reason?
They
are not committed to being on time.
Punctuality
requires commitment. I am not talking
about some super perfectionist attitude.
Kick me in the shins if I’m not there on the dot of 7:00! That kind of expectation is one destined by
the fates and the tides to come up short, especially in a complex world such as
ours. In Jules Verne’s classic “Around
the World in Eighty Days” a wealthy, stuffy English gentleman named Phileas
Fogg drives everyone crazy in his insistence that things be done precisely by
the clock. A tardy servant, even if on
one isolated occasion, would find himself instantly without a job. All things must be in their place when the
schedule, usually his, calls for them to be.
He even gives his fellow club members an argument when they declare the
time it takes to circumnavigate the globe to be far in excess of what he has
calculated to the day and hour it would take.
And he is so cocksure of himself that he bets them a fantastic sum that
he can do it in eighty days (unheard in the 1870s when the story is set) and
starts out with his servant to prove it.
Hence, it is no surprise that at the close of the story, when he thinks
he is just one day late arriving back in his home country, he feels like
crawling into a hole and hiding, until a recalculation proves otherwise and he
strolls into his club smugly with only seconds to spare, where his friends are
waiting, in vain as it turns out, to collect from him. Phileas Foggs we can all do without; they are
merely amusing, not virtuous exemplars of principle.
But
there is another we can do without.
There is such a thing as slipping into a meeting late, either
consciously or unconsciously, so as not to be conspicuous. This is especially the case when the
gathering is large – more other people to hide among; the back row is a
favorite spot. They are not sure they
really want to be where they are, doing what they have committed to do (presumably)
and it shows by the lethargy in which they place body and brain in the
room. Why did I ever sign up for
this?
Then
I perceive that some make themselves late, because it adds to their sense of
power. Business cannot get underway
without this person, and choosing for himself/herself exactly when the
proceedings begin gives this one a kind of leverage. It is a perverse pleasure to keep people
waiting; a handy way to be somewhat intimidating and self-important and subtly
controlling without being overtly rude.
“Sorry
I’m late!” A practiced latecomer is as
likely to be heard uttering these words as any normally punctual person who has
been unexpectedly detained. We
immediately sympathize with someone for whom it is a sincere humble apology, someone
with a plausible reason. But when a
habitually tardy person says this, we look upon that one with justifiable
skepticism. Sorry you’re late? Are you really? Maybe sorry you got caught breaking the
promise you made or violating your agreement!
Those three words, “Sorry I’m late,” have become a hackneyed, knee jerk
cliché that only takes on substance with a sincere convincing explanation added
to them. It is so clear to me that those
in the habit of keeping people waiting are not really sorry at all. They never stop to think what the world would
be like if everyone was as thoughtless and oblivious to time as they are. They do not seem to realize that by letting
some other agenda of theirs even partially get in the way of the agenda they
have agreed on with other people they are saying in effect, “My agenda is more
pressing than yours.”
Well,
I have issued my maxim; now I want to put forth a paradox. With what I have said thus far the impression
may have been created that I believe the trouble with the modern world is the
lack of commitment. Actually, I believe
just the opposite. Non-commitment is not
our society’s problem. Over-commitment
is. All around me I see decent and
saintly citizens who have taken on too many jobs, too many obligations, too
many projects. Even these habitual
latecomers that I have been talking about are not usually uncommitted; they are
in all likelihood over committed folk.
So many, especially parents of children, are stretching themselves too
thin, jamming their time and space with more than they or the children can
handle without the loss of serenity and at the risk of endangered health. I even know goodhearted activists on behalf
of worthy causes who think they have to jump upon every bandwagon that runs
down their street. In fact, the existence
of habitual tardiness can to a great extent be attributed to this very
overreach. They are not bad people; they
are lively people on the move who have forgotten that one object cannot occupy
more than one space at the same moment in time.
You cannot keep pace with everything going on.
Early
in my life I heard a man I otherwise respected give this dubious advice: If you have got an urgent task that needs
doing, get a busy person to do it. That
busy one knows how to get things done and is used to spending
herself/himself. Do not try to enlist a
fresh, untested recruit. I think it is
time for that notion to be buried in the ground along with old wives tales and
fairy tales. I call upon us all to take
a deep breath and slow the pace enough that those elusive priorities cease to
be so elusive. Let us spare ourselves
the embarrassment of having to declare, however sheepishly, “Sorry I’m late!”
To read other entries in my
blog, please consult its website:
enspiritus.blogspot.com. To learn
about me consult on the website the blog entry for August 9, 2013.
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