I was rather horrified by the amount of extramarital ‘playing’ that went on below deck. On our return, I organised a survey to find out whether spouses should come along on such trips in future. To my surprise, 55 per cent of staff voted no, 45 per cent were in favour. I'm old-fashioned when it comes to fidelity, so on moral grounds I overruled them. The majority isn’t always right. As a leader there are certain issues you need to take a position on.

One wrong move could be fatal and so no one makes a wrong move. It is the reason a stranger should never set out into the city without a native guide. Some cities have a plan, a diagram of the city before its founding, or a map, a schematic representation of the city as it now is. Not this city. The choreography that keeps it going would be amazing could it be seen in a single encompassing moment. That is not possible in a city which changes faster than it can be described and which tolerates cartography only on a scale of 1:1.

But on returning to the city he found it grim and was tempted to call it a post-traumatic landscape except that would have suggested the trauma was in the past. It is a city of unspoken sufferings: the wordlessness of the disappeared dissidents, the blankness at the other end of the blackmailer’s phone line, the hush after a lynching, the shiver after a beating, the abyss following child abuse, the stillness after a murder, the muteness after a rape, the long-held hopes that vanish as soundlessly as a drop of water on velvet.

But a map is a poor substitute for a life lived. The truest guide isn’t the mind of a guru but your broken, scared and scarred, lonely heart. I just wish broken-open hearts weren’t so damned painful.

The irony, of course, is that up and to the right, as appealing as it is when we’re down and to the left, is a place of separation. It’s a place where, were we to achieve it at all, we’d find ourselves utterly alone.

Obliquity— John Kay

Preface

But it isn’t just economists who make that mistake. Politicians, investors, bankers and business people believe that although they don’t solve problems according to a standard model of rational decision making, they ought to. So they pretend that they do— to others, and perhaps to themselves.

If I’d been better schooled back then in the art of accompaniment, I would have

understood how important it is to honor another person’s ability to make choices. I hope I would have understood, as good accompanists do, that everybody is in their own spot, on their own pilgrimage, and your job is to meet them where they are, help them chart their own course. I wish I had followed some advice that is rapidly becoming an adage: Let others voluntarily evolve.