Blame it on everyone else

C.S. Lewis' The Great Divorce is about a tour bus trip from the gray outer edges of hell to the bright beginnings of heaven. The narrator starts in an endless rundown small city, finds a line of people waiting for a bus, and joins the line. One of the people ahead of the narrator in line tells him about the great and famous who reject the bus trip and linger on in the outskirts of hell:

‘The nearest of those old ones is Napoleon. We know that because two chaps made the journey to see him. They’d started long before I came, of course, but I was there when they came back.’ …. 
     ‘But they got there?’ 
    ‘That’s right. He’d built himself a huge house all in the Empire style—rows of windows flaming with light….’ 
    ‘Did they see Napoleon?’ 
    ‘That’s right. They went up and looked through one of the windows. Napoleon was there all right.’ 
    ‘What was he doing?’ 
    ‘Walking up and down—up and down all the time— left-right, left-right—never stopping for a moment. The two chaps watched him for about a year and he never rested. And muttering to himself all the time. “It was Soult’s fault. It was Ney’s fault. It was Josephine’s fault. It was the fault of the Russians. It was the fault of the English.” Like that all the time. Never stopped for a moment. A little, fat man and he looked kind of tired. But he didn’t seem able to stop it.’ 

This passage came into my head ysterday while I was thinking about what to do about a collision I am involved in with some powerful people in an organization I care about. The organization suffered a major setback recently, and recovery may take years.

I have been getting worked up about how little the leadership seems to have learned from its recent debacle. But this morning I decided to see if I could find and propose some sort of new position so that instead of colliding with the folks I disagree with, we can all start pulling on the rope in the same direction.

I sent off a proposal a little while ago, an elegant piece of writing I wish I could post here :) . I was moved to do it because I sat up in bed in the dark hours realizing that the Napoleon passage is about me, too. It is not always the other people who have to see the error of their ways, who have to revisit their positions and revise their texts. In fact it is on me to stop the squabbling far, far more often than I am usually willing to acknowledge.