When I was in Grade 2, I was new to Kathmandu and didn’t even know much about basketball. I knew the ball went in the hoop. That was roughly the extent of it.
Our school team was playing in the final. They were struggling, and the crowd seemed quiet. You could feel the game slipping in the way people stopped leaning forward.
I couldn’t play.
But I could cheer.
So I started shouting encouragement from the side. I was one small voice in a large crowd, and I remember being fully aware of how small it was. Nobody had asked me to do it. There was no role for me. I simply had a voice and a game in front of me that needed something.
Eventually, our team found its momentum and won.
Afterwards, some of the players came over and told me that my cheering had helped them. I don’t know how much of that was true and how much was kindness. It doesn’t matter now. What stayed with me was not the compliment. It was the discovery that I had been able to do something at all.
What the memory turned into
I did not have the word for it then. I would learn it much later, in rooms where people use words like agency and mean something quite technical by them. But I had already met the thing itself, on the side of a basketball court, at seven years old.
Agency is not the same as power. I had no power in that game. I could not shoot, defend or run the clock. Agency is smaller and more available than that. It is the recognition that there is almost always something you can do from your side, and that the something is usually not the obvious thing.
This is the whole of it, as far as I can tell:
You don’t always need to be at the centre of the action to make a difference.
I think about this constantly in the work I do now. When I walk into a school in a district I have never visited, I am not there to solve the problem the young people in that room are facing. I could not, even if I wanted to. I am there because someone once stood at the edge of my life and made a noise on my behalf, and I know exactly what that did.
Most of the young people I meet are waiting for permission that is never going to arrive. They are waiting to be the person at the centre. They are waiting to be qualified, or older, or chosen. And in the meantime the game is going on in front of them.
What I want them to notice is the same thing I noticed by accident: that the sideline is a position too, and that a small voice used at the right moment is not nothing.
I have been on the sideline of a lot of things since then. It has turned out to be a good place to work from.