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MON Something happened today Bills, due dates and other administrative obligations have a way of appearing perfectly orderly when they are printed on a calendar. Human life does not always cooperate. Illness, fatigue, competing responsibilities and confusion can gather around a deadline without making the deadline vanish. The calendar has a comforting appearance of neutrality. […]

SUN Something happened today Juggling delivery work and taxi work exposed a very ordinary weakness in my plans. On one occasion I accepted a delivery while I still had another obligation to finish, and the expected schedule began slipping. There was a real person waiting and a real inconvenience to address. I needed to communicate […]

SAT Something happened today I could still insist on the issue. I could still ask questions. I could still protect my interests. And I could refuse to make him carry the moral weight of a system he did not create. That felt like fierce kindness in practice. Fierce, because I was not giving up my […]

FRI Something happened today There were times when I was combining taxi work with deliveries, trying to use the opportunities available to keep money coming in. It made practical sense on paper, but the paper didn’t have to drive the car, deal with delays or recover after a long shift. I was becoming more aware […]

THU Something happened today Once I saw the person-versus-system distinction, I began noticing how often organizations blur it. Sometimes deliberately. Often probably not. You contact support because something has gone wrong. The person answering the phone has limited authority, incomplete information, a script, metrics, escalation rules and a queue of other people waiting. You have […]

WED Something happened today I was trying to be more honest about what I could and could not do for people who were depending on me. The difficulty was that a boundary can be sensible when I think about it calmly and much harder to maintain when somebody is frightened, desperate or disappointed. I had […]

TUE Something happened today There I was, coming out of a painful experience built around the idea that I had become unreliable, and the next little piece of reality handed me a routine delivery that went well because I did exactly what I had been learning to do: communicate early, solve the actual problem, stay […]

MON Something happened today I found myself playing with a strange picture of reality as a stumbling process. I know the universe is not a person tripping over its own feet, and I wasn’t trying to make scientific claims about its intentions. I was trying to find a way of looking at imperfection that felt […]

SUN Something happened today The Walmart experience hurt. That sentence is deliberately plain. I do not need to inflate it into catastrophe. Nobody died. My marriage did not end. My house did not burn down. But being banned from Walmart pickup as a delivery driver hit something tender in me. I had made mistakes. I […]

I was working as a delivery driver, taking grocery orders as part of the way I earned my living. On two occasions I became nauseated and returned orders to the Walmart pickup operation rather than continue deliveries when I did not feel well. I knew those returns had created work and inconvenience for the store, […]