Oliver Burkeman, writing in his newsletter The Imperfectionist, reaches back to a book title that stopped me: Rabbi Alan Lew's This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared. Burkeman's point, characteristically, is not to alarm. Uncertainty, he argues, is not a temporary inconvenience. It is our basic state of existence. We are never ready. Not really. And waiting until we are ready is, in the end, just another way of not beginning.

I’ve recently been the sounding board for a friend who has been looking for a trustee role. So far without success but there will be one. Craig Coben, writing in the Financial Times last month, offers a sharp observation about professionals who join charity boards after long corporate careers: many miss institutional clout more than they expect. Board roles can become a way of preserving that authority in soft focus. It is an uncomfortable thought. But I suspect it deserves more honest attention than it usually receives.