What Access Cannot Give You
On presence, exposure, and why the room still matters.
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Friends,
Last week, my foot wouldn’t stop shaking.
It had been doing this for days. A nervous metronome beneath the desk, the dinner table, the edge of the bed at 3 a.m. I tried the usual remedies. Long walks. Exercise. The kind of exhaustion that’s supposed to quiet the mind. Nothing worked.
My body knew it was coming.
I was preparing for a physical meeting. Not a call, not a screen, not a recording I could pause and return to. A room. A moment. Someone I would stand in front of with nothing between us.
And I was terrified. Not of what might go wrong. Of what might be asked of me simply by being there.
In 629, a Chinese monk named Xuanzang left Chang’an and walked west. He crossed the Gobi Desert, climbed the Hindu Kush, and spent seventeen years travelling to India and back to sit with teachers who could resolve the contradictions he found in Chinese translations of Buddhist scriptures. Seven centuries later, Ibn Battuta left Tangier at twenty-one to make the pilgrimage to Mecca. He didn’t stop for thirty years, travelling 75,000 miles, seeking scholars and teachers, collecting encounters the way others collected trade goods. And in 1846, Frederick Douglass, already famous, already free, crossed the Atlantic to meet Thomas Clarkson, the 86-year-old father of British abolitionism, frail and nearly forgotten, who had spent his life fighting the slave trade. Douglass wanted to stand in the presence of the man whose work had made his own possible.
Different centuries. Different continents. Different reasons for leaving. But the same impulse: some things could only be learned in the room. Some encounters could only happen in the body.
They knew something I’m only beginning to understand.
There’s a difference between knowing about presence and knowing presence.
I’ve had the meeting before. Not this exact one, but ones like it. Moments where I stood in a room and felt something shift that I couldn’t explain afterwards. Where the air changed. Where I walked in one person and walked out another, even if I couldn’t say how.
Once you’ve had that, it’s not hypothetical anymore. You carry the knowledge in your body, not your mind. No recording captures it. No description conveys it. The people who weren’t in the room will nod politely when you try to explain, but they won’t feel it.
It comes when it comes. If it comes at all.
The strange thing about our age is that presence has become an invitation.
Xuanzang walked for seventeen years. Ibn Battuta spent three decades on the road. Douglass crossed an ocean to meet a man the world had moved past. The scarcity was built in. You had to fight for it.
Now presence comes to you. It appears in your calendar, your inbox, your city. Flights leave hourly. Livestreams broadcast everything. The distance has collapsed. The obstacles have fallen away.
And yet pilgrims still walk the Camino de Santiago. Five hundred miles on foot, when they could drive or fly or simply not go. Old paths are still worn smooth by feet choosing difficulty when ease is available.
And every night, somewhere, thousands gather in a stadium or a concert hall to hear music they already own, songs they’ve streamed a hundred times. They go anyway. They want to be in the room when it happens. They want to feel the bass in their chest, to sing with strangers, to be part of something that can’t be replayed.
The sacred act has shifted. It’s no longer the travelling. It’s the choosing. The saying yes when you could say no. The showing up when you could stay home, stay comfortable, stay in the version of life that asks nothing of you.
The invitation arrives. You decide whether to take it.
Even if you’re nervous. Especially if you’re nervous.
Sometimes you seek the meeting. Sometimes you’re called to it. Sometimes everyone is invited; sometimes only a few, chosen by lottery or numbers or what you can afford. Sometimes you’re in the room and someone you love is not. Sometimes you’re just lucky to be in the room.
It doesn’t matter how you got there. What matters is that you’re there. And when you are, you’re not just there for yourself. You carry others with you. The ones who couldn’t come. The ones who weren’t chosen. The ones watching from elsewhere, hoping you’ll tell them what it was like.
You show up for them too.
I think about what we’ve built instead.
We’ve built presences that never ask anything of us. A.I. Companions who respond at 3 a.m., never tire, never judge. Presence on demand, intimacy without risk, connection without exposure.
And none of it makes my foot shake.
A manufactured presence will never find you wanting. It will never hold you accountable. It will never look at you and ask, without words, whether you’ve become who you meant to become.
That’s not a flaw in the technology. That’s the feature. We are trading exposure for comfort, and calling it connection.
Comfort scales, but exposure does not. It can’t because it is finite.
Presence that can be dismissed becomes content.
The real thing exposes you. This is what I was nervous about. Not logistics. Not awkwardness. The exposure. The fact that I would stand in a room with nowhere to hide. No filter, no edit, no carefully constructed version of myself. Just me, as I was, in front of someone who saw me.
And underneath the nerves, the question I didn’t want to ask:
Am I worthy of this?
The shaking foot knew the answer. Or at least suspected it.
But here’s what I also knew:
The meeting doesn’t require worthiness. It requires showing up.
Every time I’ve stood in that room before, I’ve carried the same fear. The same sense of being unprepared, unfinished, not yet the person I meant to be. And every time, the presence didn’t demand that I be complete. It asked only that I be there. Actually there. Not performing presence. Not thinking about presence. Present.
The invitation doesn’t say: come when you’re ready.
It says: come.
Access gives you information. Encyclopaedias of it. Every face, every voice, every biography, searchable and retrievable. Conversations with the dead, relationships with the imagined, presence without bodies.
But access cannot give you the moment when you stand in front of something real and feel it look back.
Access cannot give you the weight of being in the room.
Access cannot give you the risk. The genuine risk of being seen, being found, being changed in ways you didn’t choose and can’t control.
That only happens when you take the invitation. When you show up nervous and unready and unsure. When you choose the real thing over the safe thing.
The meeting happened.
I’m not going to describe it. Some things resist description. Some things should.
I’ll say this: I expected to be tested.
Most meetings, the higher the stakes, the more the cat and mouse. Someone probing for weakness, someone trying to catch you out, someone keeping score. You learn to guard yourself. You prepare for the game.
But at a certain level, something shifts. The person across from you isn’t trying to trip you up. They’re not playing. All they want is to understand what you see, to offer what they know, to give you guardrails so you can do your best work.
There is no test. There is only kindness. Smiles. A calmness you weren’t prepared for.
That was harder to receive than any challenge would have been.
Real encounters don’t always give you what you expect. Sometimes you’re in awe. Sometimes you laugh. Sometimes you feel hurt. Sometimes you walk out confused, unsure whether anything happened at all. Sometimes you don’t remember anything, and you need others who were there to remind you what you saw, what you felt, what you missed while your mind was somewhere else entirely. Sometimes the weight doesn’t land until weeks later, when you’re doing something ordinary and it suddenly hits you.
AI gives you the encounter you asked for. It responds to your mood, adjusts to your needs, delivers what you want. Real presence doesn’t work that way. It gives you what it gives you. And you have to be there to receive it, whatever it turns out to be.
Not everyone feels this way. I know that. Some people walk into rooms without their pulse rising and leave without residue. That’s not wrong. Maybe they’re more whole than I am.
I mentioned the shaking foot to someone afterwards. They looked at me like I was strange. They’d been in the same room. Felt nothing like that.
Maybe my shaking is just mine. But I don’t think so. I think we all carry something into these rooms, even if some of us hold it in our feet and others hold it somewhere we can’t see.
My foot is still shaking.
Not from nervousness anymore. The body trying to return to normal after being in the room. The nervous system recalibrating after exposure to something it can’t file away or forget.
A Zoom call ends and you’re immediately elsewhere. An AI conversation closes and the silence is instant. Virtual meetings, asynchronous messages, recordings watched at 2x speed. They leave nothing behind. They’re efficient. They’re convenient. They’re over the moment they’re over.
Presence lingers. The body remembers what the mind will spend weeks trying to understand.
People ask: is it recorded?
The backup question. The second-choice question. The question of someone who wants access without commitment, information without exposure.
Access is offered. Presence is chosen. The recording is not the room.
I don’t know yet what the meeting changed in me. That will take time. It always does.
But I know I was there.
In the room. In the body. In the presence of someone who asked nothing of me except that I show up.
And my foot is still shaking.
Stay Curious - and don’t forget to be amazing,
PS. If your organisation is grappling with how AI is reshaping work and leadership, I speak and advise on this.
Rahim Hirji Author, SuperSkills (2026) | Keynote Speaker | Advisor
Building human capability for the AI era.
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