I also thought, sitting at our table with Lena across from me, about what I had agreed to. The four-week invitation was real. I had said yes and meant it and it was a legitimate agreement. What came after the four weeks was a series of non-decisions: conversations that ended without conclusions, “soon”s that didn’t become dates, an accumulating status quo that nobody had formally chosen.
Non-decisions are a choice. The choice of the person who benefits from the status quo continuing, and the consent of the person who doesn’t push hard enough to change it.
I had been both: the one disadvantaged by the status quo, and the one whose insufficient pushback allowed it to continue.
I was going to stop allowing it to continue.
The Decisive Conversation
I asked Daniel to take a walk with me on a Saturday morning, two days after the dinner with Lena. It was a cold October morning and neither of us particularly wanted to be outside, which meant the walk was clearly for a purpose and Daniel knew it.
We walked for about ten minutes without talking about anything serious. Then I said: “I need to have an actual conversation with you about your mother.”
He said okay.
I had thought about this more carefully than I had thought about the Sunday evening dish conversation. I had written some things down, not a script, but notes — because I have a tendency, under pressure, to get imprecise, and imprecision was what had let the previous conversations end without resolution.