Never Far Enough
As a wise man (me) once said: “there always seems to be one last thing to write, as if it would ever, or could ever, be sufficient.” That’s from the preface of my novel, but there’s more than meets the eye in that sentiment.
For one thing, there’s attention to detail. That’s the most explicit meaning of the sentence, but I can’t remind myself often enough how much it’s true. Sloppy attention to detail indicts the whole of the message: what else is sloppy? Can I believe the analysis? If he doesn’t care enough about that, what else is he missing? In short, sweat the details, because people are watching. If you get the details right, it builds credibility when you’re trying to say something more nuanced and complex. Which is all fine and good, but isn’t enough, either.
On the other end of the same spectrum, I’ve seen lots of work that suffers from too much focus on the detail, but which forgets the forest that is usually at least as important as the trees. This is in that sentiment, too, as “sufficiency” and its very notion. Honestly, some of that dreary work has been mine. It’s easy to spend weeks or months on a topic and lose sight of the fact everyone has their own job and areas of interest. Don’t forget to tell the whole story, with enough detail to provide context. Expand acronyms (or only footnote them). Take care to explain why things are important and assume they’re not self-explanatory. Every reader or viewer likes the sensation of knowing the why before the slides or document tells them so. They may complain, too, that there’s too much backstory (be careful to tune that also), but they’ll complain more if it’s missing entirely. So there’s that, too, but it still isn’t enough.
Most importantly, try to be audacious enough. I’ve seen plenty of work that’s sound in content and format and context, but comes across as, I don’t know, perhaps too timid. Other than scientists, who need to be meticulous and measured, a lot of work suffers from what we experts refer to as being boring. One might in fact indict this very blog as dull, were it not for the next paragraph.
So you may wonder how this blog turned into a treatise on effective presentations. I certainly do. I didn’t start out to do that at all, and such is the fate of many ill-fated slide decks: a drunken walk (in the math sense) to nowhere. Congratulations: we have arrived. So why did I set out to write something called Never Far Enough to begin with?
It turns out, in the novel, that the mother character in the chapter with this name moves away from her family to escape their pull, but not so far she can’t visit them. For me this represents a balance we all try to strike between the familiar and the new, support and self-sufficiency, comfort and novelty. Maybe this is only familiar to diaspora like myself who live a great distance from home but need to remember it and tell its stories from afar, as if only distance will allow proper perspective. In dark times, especially for those early in their career, it feels too far. And then there are those times when no matter how far one has come, whether from home or from personal demons, far can never be far enough. Sometimes, a random walk is just what you need to find what you didn’t know you needed. Far is a funny concept in the end. Subjective, illusory, hyperbolic and hopelessly ill-defined. So while I’ve taken you far into this blog, we haven’t gone too far. Certainly one can go never far enough.
