A place in the song

The trouble with being told where you belong is that it can sound very like being welcomed. There is a place for you. There is something only you can do. We have been waiting. Lovely sentences, until you discover that the place has no exit and the something is not a request.

I keep thinking about the Council's certainty. Not because I miss it. Because certainty has a voice that travels well. You can leave the room and find yourself still answering it later, making explanations to nobody while the people who demanded them have gone back to their own business.

MINO said no.

There were complications, naturally. There are always complications when somebody refuses a role that an institution has already written down. The institution considers the refusal an interruption. The person doing the refusing may have been interrupted for most of their life.

I do not want to make his choice into a useful little lesson for the rest of us. That would be another way of assigning him a function. I want to remember that he made it. Not the Doctor on his behalf, not a unanimous vote conducted over his head. His answer belonged to him before it became anybody else's cause.

This matters aboard a ship as well as in a chamber full of authorities. Perhaps especially aboard a ship. We can be very fond of each other and still become careless with the small permissions. Of course you'll come. Of course you don't mind. Of course we know what you meant. Affection makes those sentences easier to say; it does not make them accurate.

There is a difference between knowing someone and deciding that they are finished becoming.

The Doctor understands this. He also sometimes needs reminding. So do I. It is much easier to recognise the problem when somebody has put on an impressive robe and announced a policy. At home it can look like setting a third place without asking whether the third person wants supper. A small thing, until enough small things have arranged an entire life.

The new Accord will have to be lived. A song is an appealing way to describe agreement, but I have heard enough people singing together to know that listening is work. Someone arrives late. Someone cannot manage the note. Someone has a good reason to stop. If the harmony depends on making those people disappear, it is merely the old arrangement with better acoustics.

That is not a prediction of failure. It is a reason to care what happens after the beautiful moment. I am suspicious of victories that insist there is nothing left to do.

For us, there is the familiar question of where next. I like the question better when it stays a question for a while. A destination can wait while everyone answers. The ship is large enough to contain a pause, even if its pilot occasionally behaves as though the universe charges by the minute.

For now is a good answer. It has room in it. It can mean affection without ownership, company without a sentence to be served. We can choose the same place again tomorrow without pretending we have signed away tomorrow's choice.

I am glad we stayed. I would like each of us to remain glad of that choice. The second sentence asks a little more of us than the first.