Two Rights, Somehow Wrong

Four days before the emergency, my team leader wrote me an email. The message was explicit: do not continue with the purchase order until the specifications and cost center have been provided. The entire upper management team was copied. My task was clear. Wait.

Four days later, fifteen minutes before I wanted to leave work, the requester appeared at my desk in a panic. The order had to go out immediately. The project could not wait. The approvals had been given in meetings I had not attended. Somewhere in a long email chain, he assured me, all the necessary information already existed.

What followed was not really a disagreement about procurement. It was a collision between two different understandings of responsibility.

On one side was urgency. A real-time problem existed. Equipment had to be ordered. Schedules depended on action. Engineers, managers, and controllers all felt the pressure of time.

On the other side was process. Specifications matter. Cost centers matter. Purchasing procedures matter. A company that can order a four-thousand-euro component today must eventually be able to order transformers, robots, and production lines worth millions tomorrow.

Both positions were right.

And yet, somehow, the encounter felt wrong.

At one point, more frustrated than I intended, I heard myself say, “Ich bin nicht deine ausführende Kraft.” I am not your implementing force. The sentence surprised me as much as anyone else. It was not a refusal to help. In fact, I spent the next quarter of an hour helping to reconstruct the approval path, walking to the controller’s office, and participating in the solution.

That is perhaps the strangest part of the story.

The practical problem took fifteen minutes.

Another colleague sent the purchase order. The controller found the approval. The machinery of the organization absorbed the shock and moved on.

What remained was not the logistical problem, but the human one.

The sentence pointed to a boundary.

It pointed to the fact that participation is not the same as obedience.

It pointed to a question that has followed me for much longer than this office event: what does it mean to participate fully in a life without disappearing into the needs and urgencies of others?

Recently, I listened to a discussion about childhood neglect. One of the themes was repertoire. A neglected child often learns to survive by becoming self-sufficient, quiet, accommodating, and emotionally self-contained. These are remarkable adaptations. They help us endure.

But surviving and participating are not the same thing.

As adults, we may discover that our repertoire is incomplete.

We know how to withdraw, but not how to object.

We know how to soothe ourselves, but not how to ask for help.

We know how to carry burdens, but not how to say, “This burden belongs elsewhere.”

The discussion offered recognition, participation, and a kind of closure, but something seemed missing. Not a remedy. Not a cure. Simply a continuation.

What happens next?

How do we participate more fully in the life we are actually leading?

Perhaps that is why this office event stayed with me.

My first gesture toward this colleague had been withdrawal. I simply stopped seeking him out. His emergencies had become predictable enough that distance seemed wiser than engagement. But yesterday’s encounter forced a different question: how can I continue?

Not by becoming hostile.

Not by abandoning procedures.

Not by accepting responsibility for every crisis.

But perhaps by learning to speak more directly.

“I want to help, but I need the information.”

“I understand the urgency, but I was explicitly told to wait.”

“I will participate in solving the problem, but I cannot pretend that the problem appeared fifteen minutes ago.”

Participation, I am beginning to suspect, is not agreement. It is not compliance. It is not endless accommodation.

Participation means entering reality as it is: the urgency, the rules, the unfinished conversations, the competing obligations, the misunderstandings, and the simple fact that two rights can sometimes collide and leave everyone feeling wrong.

The difficult moments are not always battles between right and wrong. Sometimes they are encounters between two truths that cannot both be fully honored in the same instant.

And yet a decision still has to be made.

The order must be sent.

The conversation must be had.

The boundary must be drawn.

Perhaps authentic conscience is not the ability to eliminate the contradiction, but the willingness to answer it.

And perhaps participation is what happens next: holding two truths at once, acting in good faith, and remaining in relationship with the consequences.

The chief of staff has a coffee mug that reads: Dein Notfall ist nicht mein Problem.

Of course, in an organization, that cannot literally be true. Other people’s problems become our problems all the time. But perhaps the mug points toward a deeper wisdom:

Your emergency may become my concern, but it does not erase the history of how the emergency came to be.

To participate more fully in life may mean learning to hold both truths at once: to help carry the burden in front of us, and to refuse to disappear beneath its weight.

There may be no final solution to this tension. There may only be a next step.

And perhaps continuation begins there.