Handle it. Don't editorialize it.

Watch someone clean up a mess they didn't make. Often the cleanup takes three minutes and the complaining takes twenty. The mop comes out, but so does the speech: who left this, why is it always me, what kind of place runs like this. The work was small. The story wrapped around it is what wrecks the hour.

Marcus had a method for this, and it's almost comically blunt: "A cucumber is bitter—Throw it away.—There are briers in the road—Turn aside from them.—This is enough. Do not add, And why were such things made in the world?" (Meditations 8.50, Long). Bitter cucumber: toss it, move on. Briers: step around them. Done. The thing he warns against is the adding — the editorial, the grievance, the demand that the universe explain itself before you'll pick up the broom.

The spilled tray, the jammed printer, the customer who left the fitting room a disaster: handle it. The handling is rarely the heavy part. The heavy part is the running protest you bolt onto it, the one that turns a two-minute fix into a sour afternoon.

This is the unglamorous task, stripped of drama. There's the brier. Turn aside. Next.