Muscle Memory Forgot the Bag

For the first time in twenty-one years, I walked into an assignment without my laptop.

Twenty-one years. By now the bag practically packs itself — or so I had told myself. And then, one morning, it didn’t. I left it behind, and of course, Murphy being the reliable fellow he is, it wasn’t sitting conveniently in the next room. The session was in Marawila – a solid two hours from where I lived when I was in Colombo. There was no version of that day where someone fetched it in time.

I should have been sunk.

I wasn’t — and the reason I wasn’t is the whole point of this post.

Thayalan was with me. I send him my session slides every single time, as a matter of protocol. So he had them. We had also sent the deck to the client as a PDF beforehand — another protocol we never skip. Between the two, the slides were on screen, the talk went ahead, and not one person in that room knew that the facilitator had spent the first ten minutes quietly making peace with his own mortality.

Two lessons walked out of that morning with me.

One: the basics are exactly what you stop checking

When I first started out, I carried a little notebook in my shirt pocket with a checklist in it. Before every assignment I would tick it off — laptop, clicker, cables, handouts, the lot — and only then load the car. I never missed a thing.

I stopped about a decade ago. Not because I decided to, but because it had become ‘part of the drill.’ Muscle memory. Why check a list for something your hands could do in the dark?

That, it turns out, is precisely the trap. The things we neglect are never the new or the difficult — those have our full attention. It is the basics, the bits so worn-in that we no longer see them, that quietly slip away. You don’t forget the hard part. You forget the bag.

A checklist isn’t a sign that you don’t know your job. It is insurance against knowing it too well.

Two: ‘winging it’ is a skill, not a plan

Could I have ad-libbed a thirty- or forty-minute talk with no slides? Yes. After this long, of course I could. But it is never the same. A few guide slides do quiet work — they pace the room, they hold the structure, they catch the point you’d otherwise lose. And that morning happened to be slides only. Imagine if the session had hinged on a few activities, or a couple of videos. ‘Winging it’ has a ceiling, and you tend to discover where that ceiling is at the worst possible moment.

So the lesson isn’t ‘be ready to improvise.’ Improvisation is a talent; it is not a safety net. The lesson is to build the Plan B into the process itself, before you ever need it — the slides already in someone else’s inbox, the deck already with the client — so that when the day goes sideways, the recovery is automatic rather than heroic.

And one more, free of charge

My son heard the whole story and laughed. ‘You’re getting old,’ he said.

And maybe — just maybe — he’s right.

But I’ll take getting old with the protocols still running quietly in the background. The notebook may have left my shirt pocket years ago, but the habits it taught me were sitting in Thayalan’s laptop and the client’s inbox on the one morning I needed them most.

Everything teaches. The trick is to arrange things so that even your worst mornings leave you with something to learn — and not something to pay for.