I’ve been thinking about the power of NO, lately, and the power it takes to say when it matters most.
NO is a small word, a strong word and one of the first we learn as a child. According to parents everywhere we use it readily and effectively. Yet somehow, as I read the world today, we lose the facility, too early and too easily.
Of course the stakes I have in mind are much higher than bed-time or spinach. Many of us say no to the distasteful, or to people we aren’t fond of. We say No when a Yes would be just as easy, when the decision is trivial or a flip of a coin would do. But when the whisper of No arises not out of willfulness or for small or passing reasons, when it is the big NO, the block letter NO, when it threatens to change a life time of habits, the loss of comforts, of income, even of life and limb, and yet it grows out of everything you are, it does not come easily.
I think about this power of the No often, but this week several observations brought it particularly to focus –in the negative; the inability to think the word NO, much less say it and accept the consequences. On Sunday I had what old-time celestial navigators would call a “perfect plot,” a crossing of three sight lines on just that: the inability to say No.
To get a plot, the navigator gets up at dawn, or appears on deck at dusk; stars and a horizon are needed. Rocking a sextant, with a known star reflecting in the mirror, he brings the bottom of the arc down to kiss the horizon. He marks the angle of of the star and the precise time of the measurement. He does this until he has several stars marked or until they disappear into the daylight or the horizon is erased by the night. Then using tables in well turned books, he calculates lines of position for each body. Where the lines cross, there he is. Typically, because of moving oceans, stars disappearing in the light or the horizon in the night, an incorrectly calibrated watch or an unsteady eye, the cross is more like a triangle. There, somewhere in that area, am I. A “perfect plot” is when all lines cross in a point: a rare and a happy event in the middle of a trackless ocean before satellites and all the time perfect knowledge of where you are.
My triangulation was not of my position but of an idea: the Power of NO. Of its difficulty, and its importance. The three markers were these:
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