The Morning After

The other day, I came across Cinderella on TV and started thinking about something I had accepted since childhood without asking many questions: midnight. That precise hour when the magic ends and she has to run. I knew the scene by heart. This time, I found myself thinking about the return home.

The fairy godmother can turn a pumpkin into a carriage, conjure up horses, create a dress. She has some extraordinary resources at her disposal. Yet everything comes with an expiration time. Cinderella can enter the palace, dance, glimpse a life that had seemed reserved for other people. Then she has to go home.

I had always watched that part with the anxiety of someone hoping the heroine will make it in time. Now something else interested me: how we return to a familiar life after discovering that we could live differently.

Because the house can remain unchanged. The same walls, the same obligations, the same people telling us who we are. But a different experience can be enough to make that description feel uncomfortable. We return and recognize everything, although we can no longer fit quite as neatly into the place we occupied before.

I think some experiences have that effect. A conversation in which we dare to say what we think. A job that calls on an ability we did not know we had. A trip during which we feel a freedom that is hard to explain when we come home. For a while, we move with an ease that we struggle to recover once we are back in our routine.

Then a very human doubt surfaces: was that me, too? Or could I only be that way because I was far from home, because someone trusted me, because the circumstances were on my side?

After more than twenty years building companies, I am particularly interested in the relationship between what depends on our surroundings and what we learn to sustain on our own. A title, an organization, or the support of others can give us confidence. When circumstances change, we have to find out how much of that confidence we have made our own. Sometimes we discover it was less than we thought. At other times, we realize we had learned far more than we were willing to acknowledge.

Seen that way, Cinderella’s return carries a different weight. The evening allowed her to try out a way of being in the world. Now she has to find a way to keep something of that experience amid the tasks of the following day.

She already had worth before she entered the palace. I like to think the ball allowed her to feel it without having to defend herself at every turn. For a few hours, she could exist beyond the gaze of those who had confined her to a role. Having known that feeling gives her a point of reference. Even if fear returns, she now has something to measure it against.

And the slipper remains.

That detail began to seem more interesting to me than all the fairy godmother’s spectacle. Among so many things that return to their former shape, one small, tangible object remains. Something she can touch the next morning, when it would be so easy to convince herself that the evening was an illusion.

In our lives, that kind of evidence tends to be less striking. There may be a page we have written, a decision we have made, a conversation we finally had. Something that reminds us we were capable of acting in a way we still find difficult to repeat. Keeping that evidence close helps when habit begins to dispute what we experienced.

I also thought about how quickly we write off something once it has ended. A project closes, a relationship changes, a chapter of our lives ends, and we take stock by looking at what is gone. It takes longer to recognize what we have gained: an ability, a boundary, a question we once did not even know how to ask.

The film continued toward its familiar ending. I stayed with a quieter scene in my imagination: Cinderella the next morning, still at home, before anyone comes looking for her.

The story moves forward because the prince finds the slipper. But I am interested in the woman who does not yet know she will be found and already has to live with what she has discovered.

I wonder what she would do with that knowledge if nobody knocked on the door.

Christian Ruggeri