SHOWING UP SPECULATIVELY

There is a queue in the toilets of Melbourne Airport that I have thought about more than necessary. It is not a remarkable queue by any measurable standard, fluorescent, functional, smelling of the particular combination of industrial cleaning products and human effort that characterises airport bathrooms the world over, and yet something about it lodged. Specifically, the man in front of me, who, on reaching the front of the queue and securing a vacant cubicle, entered it with the energy of someone who was not entirely sure why they were there, but had decided, on balance, that showing up was the right move.

This got me thinking. Because I do not go to the toilet speculatively. I go when the matter has been confirmed, when the relevant internal correspondence has been received, processed, and responded to with appropriate urgency. The body sends a memo. I act on it. This seems to me the correct sequence of events.

The Aspirational visitor operates on an entirely different basis. They have not received a memo. They have, at best, received a vague suggestion, a whisper from some distant part of the organisation that conditions might be favourable. And so they show up. They commit to the cubicle. They sit, in an airport of all places, under lighting that flatters nothing and nobody, with a departure board somewhere overhead counting down with complete indifference to their situation, and they wait to see if inspiration strikes.

The optimism of this is, I will admit, not nothing.

There is a particular kind of faith required to enter a speculative situation and simply trust that something will materialise. The Confirmed visitor, myself, tends to act only when the outcome is already beyond reasonable doubt. We are efficient. We are responsive. We are, if we are being honest, somewhat limited by our requirement for certainty before we commit to anything.

The Aspirational visitor does not have this problem. They back themselves. They get in the room. A motivational speaker, presented with the Aspirational toilet visitor in the abstract, would find almost nothing to criticise. Show up, they would say. Commit before you feel ready. Trust the process. The Aspirational visitor is, in the most literal sense available to them, doing exactly that. In an airport cubicle. In Melbourne.

Because the Confirmed and the Aspirational are not merely toilet taxonomies. They are orientations toward the world. Most things worth doing, creative work, new places, conversations with strangers, reward the Aspirational more than the Confirmed. The Confirmed waits for the memo. The Aspirational shows up and trusts that something will arrive once they are already in the room.

The cubicle door opened. The man emerged looking neither triumphant nor defeated, just quietly committed to having given it a proper go. I went in. I was done in forty five seconds.

Neither of us was wrong exactly. We simply had different information.