A colleague asks a question in a meeting. You know the answer. Or think you do. The question reminds you of something you read, a framework that fits, a solution you’ve used before. Your mouth is forming the first words.
Then: a half-second of silence. Not strategic silence, not the pause before the perfectly crafted response. Just pause. The question sits there, unresolved. You notice you’re about to answer a question that isn’t the one being asked.
The understanding you were ready to offer would have been accurate, relevant, helpful. It would have closed something before it opened.
——
At CAM, the Gulbenkian’s modern art museum in Lisbon, a room of Paula Rego paintings. Dark, disturbing, late work. A woman stands in front of one for a long time. Just looking. Her companion arrives from another gallery, reads the wall text aloud, explains the feminist context, the critique of power, the childhood references.
The first woman keeps looking. She hasn’t yet decided what she’s seeing. The painting is still painting, not yet lesson.
Understanding transforms experience into possession. The moment you know what something means, it stops being able to mean anything else.
——
A child brings you a drawing. Scribbles, really. Colours everywhere. Distorted shapes. Strange dimensions. You’re about to say “That’s beautiful!” or “Tell me about it!” or “Is that a house?”
Before you speak: what if you just looked? What if the drawing didn’t need to become anything—didn’t need to be beautiful, didn’t need a narrative, didn’t need to represent?
The structure of parenting tells you to respond, to engage, to encourage. Fair enough. But there’s a moment before the response, a fraction of attention when the drawing is still becoming, when your interpretation hasn’t yet closed off its possibilities.
That moment is so brief you usually miss it.
——
Structure enables attention. The therapy session has a start time, an end time, a room, a chair, a fee. These boundaries create the container.
But the frame can become a prison. The start time becomes a race. The ending forces conclusions, or opens possibilities which have no time left to be explored. The fee risks transforming relationship into transaction. Structure, meant to create space for emergence, begins to dictate what can emerge. 1
The difference lies in how we attend. A stance so subtle it’s hard to name. Bion called it being “without memory, without desire, without understanding.” Not emptiness. A particular fullness — full attention that hasn’t yet crystallised into interpretation; that hasn’t been polluted by the will to productively help; that avoids consporcation by what we think we know from experience.
——
In meetings, agendas are scaffolds or cages depending on this same invisible pivot. The agenda that creates space for conversation versus the agenda that dictates outcomes. The difference isn’t in the document. It’s in how people bring themselves to it.
A good chair knows when to abandon the agenda. Not arbitrarily. There’s structure in that knowing. But the structure serves emergence rather than controlling it. The meeting finds what it needs to find, not what was predetermined.
This requires tolerance for not knowing where you’re going. 2 Most organisations can’t bear it. They mistake emergence for chaos, structure for clarity.
——
The Saturday that wasn’t: a ritual became a mechanism when it became predictable. The open mode developed closed-mode characteristics. Forgetting it wasn’t failure—it was emergence reclaiming itself. 3
Structure forgets itself when it becomes automatic. The ritual that once created space now fills it. Understanding — “this is what Saturdays are for” — replaces the attention that made Saturdays matter.
Sometimes you need to break the frame to remember what the frame was for.
——
A therapist listens to a patient describe a situation. The patterns are obvious. At least, they’re obvious to someone trained in such a task.
Bion’s discipline: resist. Don’t interpret. Not yet. Let the material keep speaking. Your understanding, however accurate, is premature. It forecloses what hasn’t yet revealed itself.
The patient keeps talking. New details emerge. The situation shifts. What seemed obvious becomes complex, then ambiguous, then something else entirely. The interpretation you were ready to offer five minutes ago would have been correct and completely wrong. Or, as my analyst said, “you’ll just have to wait years until you’re ready to say it or your client is ready to listen”.
Understanding is violence when it arrives too early.
——
Or take conversation. Someone tells you about a problem they’re facing. You recognise it immediately: you’ve had the same problem, or know someone who did, or read about it, or can see the solution clearly.
You offer your understanding. Helpful, generous, accurate.
But what if the person wasn’t looking for solutions? What if they needed to keep discovering the problem, to feel its edges, to sit with not knowing? Your understanding, however well-intentioned, interrupted a process that hadn’t completed.
The structure of conversation — turn-taking, responding, helping — can become a mechanism that prevents real listening. You’re so busy understanding that you’ve stopped paying attention.
——
Emergence without structure is noise. Random, formless, going nowhere. You need the container, the frame, the constraints.
But structure without emergence is mechanism. Repetition without discovery, process without life, form without content.
The boundary between them is located in attention itself. The kind that can hold structure lightly enough that it remains scaffold rather than cage. Attention that suspends understanding long enough for something to emerge that wasn’t already known.
This suspension lasts a moment. A breath, or even less. The space between question and answer. Between seeing and naming. Between experience and interpretation.
We tend to collapse that space immediately. Understanding rushes in. We know what things are before we’ve seen them, really.
Occasionally, rarely, we manage to wait. To attend without grasping. To hold the frame without forcing the content.
In that pause—before memory, before desire, before understanding—something else becomes possible.
Just: not yet foreclosed.
- See “Emotional Bureaucrats” on how liberatory insights become bureaucratic procedures when filtered through efficiency-obsessed systems. ↩︎
- I explored this tolerance for uncertainty in “The Curious Middle.” ↩︎
- From “The Saturday that wasn’t.” ↩︎