I struggle with being careful. My natural inclination is to lurch forward into the day like a child’s wagon rolling downhill, scraping my ankles on the books I left on the bedroom floor, dropping my teaspoon down the gap between the oven and the counter, reading a report off my phone with one hand while brushing my teeth with the other. My words always seem to come tumbling out in an undisciplined torrent of thought and idea, because I have a ridiculous fear that if I don’t speak quickly, I’ll forget what I was trying to say.

I was riding passenger in a rattletrap old pickup yesterday. It was a technicolor dusk, smotheringly hot, downtown Saint Paul ablaze with artificial light on the horizon. A thunderstorm had passed over the Cities and flooded the gutters with one of those intense, concentrated precipitation events that are increasingly common in this part of the world, but right now the clouds overhead looked like carded wool. Drivers were switching lanes with reckless disregard for safety, and on the radio, four academics were having an intense and increasingly personal debate about the Transatlantic Alliance.

The main point of contention – you could hear it in how their tones sharpened – was  whether certain recent events had irreparably damaged the relationship between the United States and the European Union. Sometimes it helps me to visualize the argument in my head. I imagined this one as a cat’s cradle of interconnected threads. Cat’s cradle is an ancient game, and I suspect part of the appeal is that it’s so easy to screw it up. Twist the wrong string and instead of an Eiffel Tower in yarn you have a useless snarl of strings. Trust and values, national interest and public good, each binding us to people across the ocean, each easily tangled with the rest.

I could talk about the strategic planning process at length. I will, in my paper. But that’s not what I’m reflecting on here, really. Here, I’m thinking about what it means to be careful. In every meeting, in every communication. You know the feeling: you’re sending an email to someone you barely know, and you fuss over every word. Or you’re in a meeting and you’re watching everyone, worrying that someone has been left out. Or you’re trying to fold in the editorial suggestions of six different people, wondering how to reconcile contradictory opinions in a way that pleases everybody. And maybe you’re the intern, and you don’t have to worry as much about maintaining group cohesion, but the point of this graduate program is that, one day, maintaining group cohesion might be part of your job.

A few weeks ago, my host supervisor asked me to draw up a list of questions that staff might have about the new strategic plan. This turned out to be a surprisingly enjoyable activity, in part because it involved anticipating what staff might ask before they ever asked it. It strikes me that this is the hardest part of planning: to hasten slowly. To make a plan ambitious and exciting and eminently persuasive, without sacrificing accuracy or the good opinion of your colleagues. And that’s a level of deliberate, patient detail work that can be both difficult and thankless, even as it keeps nonprofits and alliances and transatlantic coalitions together.

I’m not a careful person by nature. But I think I’d like to become one.

I was in Des Moines this past week, on two warm green days where we sat in the Raccoon River Lodge and talked about the Protect Land and Water pillar of the Shared Conservation Agenda. During lunch, we wandered out onto the grass, watching the darning-needle shapes of herons fly over the water. Redwing blackbirds chirred from the tall grass that hemmed the silver edge of the water. It was a beautiful place to have a conference, but the water that came out of the hotel taps was flat and tasted faintly of pond.

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