People as they are

Look back at the week. The silent coworker whose motive you invented. The fast job you nearly called sloppy. The wrong you learned to reconstruct kindly. The difficult teammate you chose to teach or bear. Last night's clipped answer at the dinner table. One skill ran through all of it: reading what people do without pretending to read why, and granting them the more generous story.

There's a last piece, and Marcus names it. When some careless, shameless, self-serving person rattles you, he says, "immediately ask thyself, Is it possible, then, that shameless men should not be in the world? It is not possible. Do not, then, require what is impossible" (Meditations 9.42, Long). The shock is the problem. You keep expecting people to be other than they are, and then taking it personally when they aren't. Of course the line-cutter cut the line. Of course the coaster coasted. Such people exist; the world has always held a share of them.

That's not cynicism — it's the floor that lets you stop bracing for betrayal and just deal with the person in front of you. The line cook, the long-haul driver, the parent at the late feed: each works among people exactly as flawed as people are.

Next week turns to decisions you can't see the end of. It's lighter going once you've stopped demanding that everyone first become someone else.