I woke up late on Monday. Not very late, but that half-hour late where you think you are going to catch up, and then all of a sudden, you’re not. Portland wore its usual face, a gray sky dripping a soft drizzle, like someone had dimmed the lights a little too much in the world. The coffee smelled burnt, but I drank it anyway.
Work. Again.
We were knee-deep into this new project of mobile app development in Portland, and my brain had started feeling like an overworked browser with too many tabs open. Slack messages. Figma links. Random memes someone had dropped to ‘keep morale high.’ But weird, right? Something seemed… different? Like, the chaos was still there but didn’t cut sharp around the edges. Or maybe I was just too tired to fight it.
The Non-Wrong Meeting
Morning meeting. Cameras off (thank God) so you can barely even tell I’m looking at the screen. I half-listened at first, waiting for the usual tension—design vs. dev, pixels vs. practicality. But then someone said something about the button animation “feeling impatient,” which didn’t even make sense but somehow made perfect sense. We weren’t talking specs. We were talking feelings. That’s rare.
And without warning everybody leapt in. Concepts ricocheting around like a messy jazz session— no order, no hierarchy. Just … rhythm. At first I hardly noticed, but we were actually concurring on things. Not because we were polite, but because something jived. Like, for once nobody was trying to be the smartest person on the call.
(Wait–did I already say this? Maybe. Whatevs.)
Anyway, the call ends and my screen freezes me in a smile. I think, this—this is progress. Not the “look how productive we are” kind. The quiet kind.
A Side Note About Silence
Portland has this weird silence that makes you hear yourself. Comforting and also … not. Sometimes it reminds you of things you don’t want to think about. Like how lonely remote work can be even when your calendar is full of faces.
Not collaboration, it does not fix that but it certainly softens it. Like background music makes a room feel less empty.
Sorry. I lost the thread for a sec.
The LA Call That Shifted Something
A few days later we had a cross-city call with a partner team from an app development company Los Angeles. These calls usually feel like someone put a Portland tortoise next to an LA hummingbird-tortoise is too fast, too loud. But weirdly that day, it worked.
Lead showed us their design prototypes. Bright aesthetic, sleek, and bold. Ours was muted, minimalist, almost shy in comparison to the bold aesthetic he’d been expecting. Yet strangely aligned.
They spoke of emotion. Of rhythm. Of how an app should be, live but not needy. And I’m thinking, wow, we’re all saying the same thing with a different accent.
Maybe it’s not about finishing faster,’ their creative lead offered. ‘It’s about misunderstanding each other less.”
God. That line still comes to me at intervals, like a song lyric I can’t shake.
A Random Digression Into Music
Margaret Atwood famously said that writing with a friend feels like singing. This is true: you’ve all got that collective ear for the same harmony — except, one of you’s tone-deaf and you’re concretely set on playing jazz in a rock band.
Oh, hold on, is that what I was talking about? That’s right, collaboration.
It’s messy, and sometimes that’s the best part. The mistakes, the rewrites, the I-don’t-get-what-you’re-saying-but-let’s-try-anyway moments. That’s the real glue.
Small Cracks That Let the Real Stuff Through
There’s this intern—we’ll call her Maya—who’s twenty-two and terrifyingly honest. She once pointed out that my color palette was “sad beige.” (She wasn’t wrong.)
Or the developer who confessed on a call he didn’t get the new API thing yet. You could almost hear the collective exhale—everyone thinking, “Oh, we’re allowed to say that?”
Emojis came next in the project manager’s updates. Tiny ones – 🌱, ☕, 🌀 – but it somehow made everything lighter. I can’t explain why. Maybe because it reminded us there’s a person behind every deadline.
Progress Isn’t What I Thought It Was
I used to equate progress with speed. Numbers. “Output.” (Good grief, that term.) Lately, I’ve found it to be of a different sort. Stranger. There is an electricity in the air when collaboration is working, like static before a storm. Everyone moves in synchronization without intending to.
Sometimes, I feel that is how life should be as well.
The Late-Night Call
Most days, it all somehow miraculously holds together, communication flowing, everything on time. Most days. Then there are those days it all comes crashing down in a heap of miscommunication and mess, all running late and the like. But even that feels part of the process. Like friction that keeps the fire going.
Contradiction, perhaps? That progress needs both chaos and calm? I don’t know. I’m still figuring it out.
I was up talking to the LA designer at midnight. He held for me pretty much nothing but apps. We were not even discussing work, but rather just this conversation about how apps are these very strange emotional things and how, as users, you never really see the people behind them.
“Collaboration is just trust made visible,” he said.
I think that broke me a little because yeah, that’s it, that’s everything.
Back to the Beginning
Rain. Lights against wet pavement. Now, walking through downtown Portland, he notices signs of people working together everywhere. Street musicians in tune by instinct. Strangers sharing umbrellas. Even traffic, of a mess, is a form of it.
Maybe that’s what all of us are trying to do. Sync even briefly.
And maybe collaboration isn’t about shared work after all. Maybe it’s about shared aliveness.
I don’t know. I keep coming back to that burnt Monday morning coffee, the sound of Slack popping throughout the day. All of it seemed too everyday to count. But maybe that is exactly when change creeps in—unheralded, unseen.
