Made for each other

Watch the lunch rush from the pass. The order lands, a cook fires it, a runner carries it, a busser clears the table it goes to. Pull any one person out and the whole thing stalls. None of them could feed that room alone, and none of them is trying to. The work only exists because it's shared.

We forget this. The day starts feeling like you against the schedule, you against the queue, you against the people who keep dropping things on your half of the job. But that frame was wrong before you clocked in. Cicero, writing on duty two thousand years ago, traced it back further than the workplace: "men, too, are born for the sake of men, that they may be able mutually to help one another" (De Officiis 1.22, Miller). Not born for ourselves alone. Born to be of use to each other.

This week starts there, because it's the floor under everything justice asks of you. Fairness, honesty, carrying your weight, giving credit — none of it makes sense until you see that the work was cooperative from the start. The driver, the nurse, the framer on the third floor: each is one part of something none of them could do alone.

You're not an island that occasionally trades with other islands. You're a hand, and the work is the body.