The Meeting That Never Ended

It’s 11:40 at night and the meeting ended six hours ago.

You’re lying in bed, and you’re back in that conference room, except this time you say the smart thing instead of the thing you actually said. You watch your coworker’s face again, trying to figure out if that pause before she answered meant something. You draft the follow-up email in your head. You delete it. You draft it again.

Nobody is in the room with you. It’s just you, the ceiling, and a meeting that ended hours ago but apparently isn’t finished with you yet.

You tell yourself you’re being thorough. Careful. Making sure you didn’t miss anything. But somewhere around the fourth replay, you’re not analyzing the meeting anymore. You’re just visiting it, the way you’d visit a bruise to see if it still hurts.

It still hurts. It’ll still hurt tomorrow too, if you keep pressing on it tonight.

Your partner rolls over and asks if you’re okay. You say you’re fine, just thinking. Which is true. You are thinking. You’ve been thinking for six hours about eleven seconds of somebody’s face.

Somewhere in there you finally fall asleep, not because you solved anything, but because your body simply stopped letting you keep going. In the morning the meeting will feel smaller. Not because you figured it out overnight. Because you finally stopped rehearsing it long enough for it to become the past.

If this is a room you’ve spent a few nights in, you’re not alone in it. Rick Novak writes about the patterns that keep us up at night and how people move through them. Find his books at ricknovakauthor.com, or watch a short video introduction at breakingchaosbuildingclarity.com/books.