The Execution Phase
A year ago, I wrote that I was having trouble inviting depth, in conversations with my friends. The skillset I had used to engage people in college failed in the new domain of post-college life: it assumed that everyone was flailing, exploring, always with a backlog of experiences to process, always with questions about who they were and what they wanted to be doing – whereas, out of undergrad, that was no longer the case. People kept telling me that they were happy and their lives were manageable. I was frustrated. I didn’t wish that my friends were more angsty, exactly, but I did feel like it would be been easier to talk to them if they were. I missed digging in to what was going on with people.
In the last year, both my perspective and the conversational dynamics have shifted, to a much better place. I feel like I’ve learned a new stance from which to enter conversation. A small example of this change: instead of asking what’s new?, a question which frequently raised the slightly awkward observation that nothing much was new, I now ask what’s been on your mind?, which people have an easier time answering. Regardless of how routine the days have felt, typically there is something taking up people’s brainspace – maybe a big project at work, or drama in their extended family, or a geopolitical issue; maybe a new hobby, or an old memory, or a surprising sense of contentment. Conversations formed in response to this prompt at their best become a cradle for that something: a chance to set it down, perhaps for the first time, to sit next to it, as it were, and breathe, and think about how to orient around it.
The specific phrasing of these prompting questions is a small matter, but I think it does make a difference what underlying paradigm I bring to a conversation. If, a year ago, I was implicitly expecting people to have overwhelming new experiences that needed to be processed, when that’s not the life they were living: of course the conversation became pushback, of course the focus became how life was simply fine. Shifting my expectations of how people are moving through the world has shifted the way I talk, and has made conversation easier and more comfortable all around.
This reorientation was necessary because my peers’ phase of life has changed. Most of my friends are not in an exploration phase, right now. Instead, they’re in what I’ve come to call an execution phase: not figuring-out-what-to-do, but actually-doing-it. The emphasis is more on action, rather than theory; on world, rather than self. We’re taking things seriously and really committing to them; and if at some level everything continues to be experimental, the timescale is long enough that day-by-day it just feels like life. It took me a while, but in this last year, I’ve taken a liking to the execution phase. When I imagine patterns of these phases with more or less exploration and more or less execution interspersed through our lives, I think, how could I possibly want life to be, but like this?
But I don’t think I’m alone in having trouble taking the execution phase on its own terms. Mindset shifts like these are not automatic. A few weeks ago, I was chatting with an acquaintance who had graduated with her master’s degree a few months prior and had recently started full-time work. In the conversation, she apologized for being dull, and she said with some discomfort that she was now just walking the path her past self had set out for her. And I wanted to say: No, it’s okay! You’re in an execution phase now. It’s different! And wonderful! And can have its own profile. It’s okay not to have things to talk through; there are still things to talk about. It’s okay there’s seemingly nothing new occurring; there are still these slow and treacly shifts in salience that are so much the bulk of life. We can sit with them together.
So I’ve come to embrace the conversational implications of this turn of phase. In the exploration phase, to get to a conversation with emotional heart, you can just say what’s on your mind. In the execution phase, what’s on your mind is probably the technical detail of whatever you’re doing. A deep conversation then requires a next level of reflection, or a little bit of stepping aside and letting a side-thought rise. But that’s wonderful. I love it when I’m able to give someone the space to think about something in a new way. And those conversations, often quiet, are also often real, and subtle, and profound.
Conceptualizing this first stretch of post-college time as an execution phase has helped me a lot. I needed to reason about and put a name to this transition towards the steady – from internship angst to full-time jobs, or from crazy situationship drama to stable relationships. But I don’t mean to reify the phrase too much. I don’t believe that exploration vs execution is a main dynamic of our lives; just that it has been a characteristic dynamic within my particular social sphere in this particular stretch of years. As our lives change – as my peers start making career pivots, or having children, or encountering death or disease or aging up close, or any of the other transitions that will arise – I suspect that different phases and dynamics will emerge. I look forward to it all. I’m curious what the character of these various stages will be. And I hope that my stance within conversations can shift in turn; responsive to the state that people are in, and loving them in it.
Guide our steps by truth and mercy. Give us strength to follow our decided paths when it is right; steer us in other directions when it is not; and accompany us in those times of confusion and compasslessness. Help us understand that however surefooted we do or do not feel, still we are dancing together, improvising always, in the swing and rhythm of all that is unfolding. Let these stages spin.
May love flow through us: whether our paces match or differ, whether we are side-by-side or at a crossways. Let the light spill forth from us. And let us meet the light gently, when it comes; in exultation.
