We were forty minutes into a meeting when I realized clearly,
That I had missed the foundational assumption quite severely,
A premise established in the opening that I hadn’t caught,
And everything since built on a misunderstood thought.
I had two options: interrupt and ask the question now,
And reveal the gap in my attention, or just allow
The meeting to conclude and try to piece it together later,
From the notes of people who had understood it greater.
The question I should have asked at minute two,
I let it wait until the gap was too wide to get through,
Now I am nodding at the conclusions of a thing I missed,
The question I should have asked earlier persists.
I raised my hand at minute forty-two and said excuse me,
I want to make sure I understand — and you could see
The slight recalibration of the room around the ask,
A minor rewind required to complete the task.
The presenter went back to the slide I should have stopped at first,
Explained the thing in thirty seconds and dissolved my thirst,
Everyone nodded in a way that said they also maybe needed that,
Which was its own small embarrassing and validating fact.
The lesson is approximately: ask the question when you have it,
Do not calculate the social cost and choose to abandon it,
Because the cost of asking at minute two is a small embarrassment,
But the cost of asking at minute forty is magnificent.
And the cost of not asking at all is to leave the meeting,
With a working reconstruction rather than the actual greeting
Of the information that was in the room the whole time waiting,
A cost that compounds through every downstream meeting.