I had prepared for this. My phone was set to do-not-disturb, screen down. My laptop stayed in the bag. I brought a notepad, the old-fashioned kind, because my brain works by externalizing things. When someone says something interesting, my instinct is to follow it sideways, to look at the idea from another angle while they’re still talking. The notepad was the workaround. I’d capture what was moving in my head and process it later, rather than chasing ideas in real time. Problem solved.

Except the notepad became exactly what I had promised it wouldn’t be. And somewhere in the meeting, the phone came out too. Quietly. But it was there.

What I didn’t know was that someone had noticed.

Meg’s text arrived later, short and direct: “Your inattention has been noted.”

I sat with that for a moment, and not with indignation. She was right. I had been multiple weeks on the road, back-to-back high-pressure situations, the kind of accumulated fatigue that doesn’t announce itself as fatigue. It just shows up as old patterns. And this was an old pattern: the subdelegated attention, the lateral thinking, the looking-busy-doing-something-else that isn’t quite the same as performing listening, no matter how engaged the underlying thinking is. I knew this pattern. I had built a workaround for it. And then I had routed around the workaround without noticing.

There’s something particular about being caught doing exactly what you prepared not to do. The preparation almost makes it worse. You can’t claim ignorance or accident. You saw it coming, tried to prevent it, and it happened anyway. The behavior found a new container.

I had a choice at that point. I could sit with the text, file it away, tell myself I’d do better next time. That would have been the easier version. It would also have been the version where I explained to myself, privately, why it wasn’t quite as bad as it looked, and eventually believed it.

I chose the other path. I found Meg instead.

The schedule was full. It always is. I carved out the time, found her in the middle of whatever came next, and said: You got me. I was dead wrong. What do we need to do to move forward?

She was shocked, and not by the mistake, which she had already addressed. She was shocked that I wasn’t explaining myself. That I hadn’t come to her with context about the weeks on the road, the exhaustion, the way my brain works when it’s engaged. She had prepared, I think, for the version of the conversation where I offered a frame for doing the wrong thing.

She explained her reasoning — why she’d sent the text, what she’d seen — and her reasoning was completely sound. I wasn’t offended by any of it. But she carried an expression on her face when I didn’t push back. It was a shocked relief. That reaction told me something about how rare this moment has become, and how much we have learned to expect defensiveness in others.

The grace that followed was immediate. It was not conditional or measured. She said we were fine, and that was the end of it. The whole weight of the thing dissolved in about ninety seconds.

Why was ninety seconds enough?

I think it’s because nothing was left unresolved. I hadn’t softened the mistake into something more manageable. I hadn’t given her a reason to keep holding it. When someone owns something fully, there’s nothing left to argue about. The grace doesn’t have to work around anything.

We have built elaborate machinery for not being wrong, and most of it is subtle. We don’t lie, we contextualize. We don’t deny, we explain. We give the mistake a frame that makes it understandable, pointing to the circumstances any reasonable person would take into account. And we have gotten so good at this that when someone just says “I got it wrong” and means it, without the machinery, without the frame, it reads as remarkable. This says more about our societal baseline than it does about the person standing there saying it.

I’m aware of something ironic in writing this. Meg’s correction came quietly. It was a private text, a private conversation, no audience. There was grace in the way she did it. It was direct and contained with just the two of us and the fact of what had happened. She chose to handle it without drama. Here I am making it public.

I think the piece still wants to be written, because what I took from it is bigger than the incident. But I want to name the tension rather than pretend it isn’t there, because pretending it isn’t there would be its own kind of avoidance, which, as it turns out, is what started all of this.

I went into that meeting having prepared to be present, and I failed. I went into the conversation with Meg having prepared nothing, and that was the right call.

Some things don’t benefit from a workaround.

If something here landed differently than you expected — I’m reachable by reply.

I asked if she was sure. The handle was already giving her trouble; I could see it had been forced back into its housing more than once. The zippers had gone rough on two of the pockets. The outer fabric was worn thin in places, faintly braided where something had caught and pulled.

“It’s been all over the world,” she said. “It’s now done.”

I didn’t understand at the time what she was handing me. I thought she was just solving a problem, something to carry my father’s shirts back home. I said I’d get it back to her when I was through. She looked at me with the patience of someone who had already made up her mind.

“I don’t need it anymore.”

That bag lasted five more years.

I took it on dozens of business trips, three or four days at a stretch, the same loop: pack, roll, gate, overhead bin, hotel, repeat. Every time the handle stuck, I gave it a little extra force and kept going. Every time I thought, okay, time to retire this one, I’d think about France or the Falkland Islands. Wherever else my father and Patt had carried it before me. And, I’d push the thought aside.

I’m not sure I could tell you exactly when I understood what she had done. But somewhere in those five years, on some flight I couldn’t name, it settled: she hadn’t been offloading a broken suitcase. She’d handed me something that had circled the world with my father and with her, gone through customs in countries I’d only read about, been shoved into overhead bins in languages I don’t speak. And she’d said, take it further. I don’t need it anymore. You do.

On the last trip, I was standing in the aisle, and the handle wouldn’t go back down. I worked it for a few seconds. Then longer. A few people waited behind me. I used both hands and pushed until it gave.

That was the end. I knew it then.

What I didn’t expect was how hard it would be to find a replacement, or why the word itself already felt wrong.

I looked up the same brand, the same model name. The manufacturer had updated it: slightly smaller, a bit lighter, better wheels, cleaner construction. Nicer to handle in every measurable way. I ordered it. It arrived in a blue I hadn’t planned on, not a mark on it, handle gliding up and down like it had no history at all.

For a week, both bags sat on the floor of my entryway, side by side. I walked past them every morning and told myself I was still comparing, still deciding.

I’d decided. What I hadn’t done was let go.

I kept finding reasons not to put the red one away. The new one was fine. It was better. I knew that. But I kept standing there, looking at both of them, and feeling something I couldn’t name until I finally could: I didn’t want a replacement. I wanted the same bag. I wanted the blue one to carry what the red one carried, the miles my father and Patt had put on it before me, the weight of that afternoon in the garage, the quiet act of handing something forward and saying take it further. I wanted the new one to already mean something, without having to earn it.

It doesn’t work that way.

And I think it’s the same reason transitions are harder than they look in any organization. We don’t just miss what’s leaving. We want its replacement to arrive already worn in, already weighted with the same context and trust, as if meaning can transfer along with function. As if you can hand someone a role and expect them to understand what it held before they held it.

They won’t. Not on the first trip, maybe not for years. Meaning has to be built again, from scratch, one trip at a time, until the new thing has its own story to carry.

The blue bag is packed for the next flight. It’s lighter than I’m used to. The handle slides up and down without any resistance, which I notice every time, the way you notice something that used to require effort and now doesn’t.

The red one is still on the floor of the entryway.

I haven’t moved it yet.

If something here landed differently than you expected — I’m reachable by reply.

To be clear, I did not invent the thing.

At several points during construction, it looked less like engineering and more like the beginning of a very questionable backyard experiment. My wife came outside at one point, looked at the pile of plastic and glue and improvised fittings, and gave me the kind of expression that manages to communicate both support and skepticism simultaneously.

Fair enough. I wasn’t entirely certain either.

I knew that sifting compost by hand took forever. Our family has done it before with screens, shovels, aching backs, and a cubic yard of compost that could easily stretch across multiple days. It was slow, repetitive, and exhausting. The trommel promised something different. It would have a rotating screen: compost goes in one side, fine material falls through, and larger unfinished pieces tumble out the end. Its noot sophisticated; that’s the whole point.

While I was building it, I miscut the main axle by about an inch. I’d misunderstood how the whole thing came together structurally, and the mistake was obvious the moment I tried to fit the piece.

My son watched the entire thing happen.

There’s a particular kind of silence children have when they realize an adult may have genuinely messed something up. Then came the commentary.

“Wow,” he said. “You really screwed that part up.”

Which was accurate.

I told him something like: this is what happens sometimes. You make mistakes. Then you figure out how to make it work anyway. We adjusted the fit, salvaged the part, and kept moving. Eventually, this ridiculous-looking machine started working, spectacularly well.

When a compost trommel runs correctly, it makes this incredible sound. The closest comparison I can find is gravel being poured continuously onto a hard surface. It is a rushing, tumbling mechanical rhythm. Suddenly, there it was: black crumbly compost flying through the screen in huge volumes. My son lit up immediately. He was genuinely excited, not the polite version kids produce when they’re trying to be encouraging. The machine was moving so fast I could barely keep up feeding material while he ran the trommel itself. In about ninety minutes, we processed what would normally have taken several days by hand.

The trommel wasn’t innovative. Compost-processing efficiency is not exactly a latent passion I’d been waiting to unlock and post to LinkedIn.

The older I get, the more I think modern professional life can quietly disconnect us from visible outcomes. Much of my work now lives inside systems, meetings, implementation plans, AI workflows, and abstract problem-solving. It is important work, certainly. Often, it is intellectual work. Sometimes it is even meaningful work. But it is increasingly possible to spend entire days operating several layers removed from tangible consequence. You move information around. You optimize processes. You discuss frameworks. You iterate digitally.

And then occasionally you build a strange machine out of cheap PVC pipe and scrap plastic, and reality answers you immediately.

Either the axle fits, or it doesn’t. Either the compost flows, or it jams. Either gravity works with you, or it doesn’t care about your intentions. There is something deeply clarifying about that kind of feedback.

I grew up with days working on a ranch. Ranch life constantly moves between physical labor and problem-solving. You repair things because they need repairing. You adapt because weather, equipment, and biology do not pause for ideal conditions. Then you leave that world and enter another one built mostly from abstraction and intellect. And I value that world too. I love ideas. I love technology. I work in systems that are often highly conceptual.

I sometimes wonder what we lose when too much of life becomes detached from physical consequence.

Because tangible work has a particular honesty to it. It doesn’t care about performance. It cares about engagement. The trommel didn’t need to look professional to function beautifully. It didn’t require elegance. It just required enough understanding of the underlying problem to let ordinary materials create momentum together.

Children need to see that. They don’t need polished expertise or adults performing competence like it comes naturally. They need to see recoverable mistakes. They need to watch people build imperfect things that wobble a little and still succeed. Capability is often far less glamorous than it appears from a distance. Sometimes it’s just persistence plus adjustment plus attention. Sometimes it’s cutting the axle wrong and figuring it out anyway.

The older I get, the less I trust sophistication as a proxy for wisdom. Some of the most meaningful systems in life are surprisingly ordinary once you see how they actually work. Thoughtfully arranged parts. Steady movement. Visible consequence.

If something here landed differently than you expected — I’m reachable by reply.

That’s the whole setup, really. We were standing there, probably past the point where the conversation gets looser and the night starts feeling like it might actually mean something, and he saw a pint glass. It had a Milwaukee Bucks emblem and net on it so that the pint glass looked like it should be hanging on a rim. It was genuinely beautiful in the way that functional objects sometimes are. The kind of thing you notice and then keep glancing back at.

Ron is not a man who lights up easily. He’s not a glad-hander. He doesn’t do the reflexive enthusiasm. When something impresses him, you know it, and you want it. There’s a version of professional respect that operates on proximity. You feel sharper when you’re near certain people, and Ron is one of those people for me. So when his eyes went to that glass, I noticed.

I’m a rugby guy. Spent more time in pubs and bars than I probably should have, which means I also picked up certain skills that don’t belong on a résumé. When something truly worth keeping was headed for the dish pit, it had a way of ending up in a pocket. I’ve always been judicious about it. I have a plastic mug from Eskimo Joe’s from the lunch we celebrated my first doctoral dissertation. And I have a wine glass from Jamie Oliver’s place in Oxford after my graduation. Objects that mark something real.

A bartender told me once — with a wink, and I chose to believe her — that as long as you weren’t greedy about it, the breakage rate covered the math. Those glasses were going to get broken. It’s better they go somewhere they’d be remembered.

I’m not entirely sure I believe the justification. But I’ve always left a tip large enough to cover it.

The Bucks pint glass disappeared into my bag that night, still dripping with beer. I handed it to Ron soon after.

A few days ago, he sent me a photo. The Bucks glass, sitting on whatever surface it’s found a home on. A short text saying that every time he uses it, ice cold and full of frosty goodness, he remembers.

For someone of Ron’s caliber to be moved by anything I did means something to me.

We spend so much energy designing the things that are supposed to bond teams — the retreats, the swag, the carefully planned shared experiences. Sometimes that works. But sometimes it’s one person who notices another person’s eyes go to a glass.

I don’t have a clean way to end this. I’m still a little surprised the glass made it home intact. I’m more surprised by what it’s held since.

If something here landed differently than you expected — I’m reachable by reply.

She ran that organization for eighteen years. I grew up alongside it, not always paying attention to what that meant.

Saturday, The History Museum (the modern name for the Cascade County Historical Society) gave her its Legacy Award. I went expecting something modest — a plaque, some applause, a few familiar faces. What I found was a room full of people whose lives she had moved through and left changed.

Person after person came up to her, one after another — some I recognized, many I didn’t — each of them carrying a version of her I’d never seen. The colleague who remembered a specific decision she made in year three. The volunteer who said she’d changed the way they thought about their own town. You could feel the accumulated weight of eighteen years in the room, and it was heavier than I’d understood.

Then Connie came over.

Connie Constan is the current director. She walked up to me — not to my mother, to me — and said she knew who I was. I’ve been gone from Great Falls for nearly fifteen years. I had no idea how she’d place me. Turns out we’d been in middle school and high school band together. And, turns out we’d had overlapping professors at the University of Montana. These are the small connective threads that hold small cities together, and you forget about them until someone pulls one.

But then she said, when she thinks of the Historical Society — its identity, what it stands for in the community — she thinks of my mother.

Not the building. Not the collection. My mother.

The organization has grown roughly twenty times over since my mother started. It is a genuine civic force now. And Connie, who leads it, who has made it her own — she still locates its soul in the woman who started all those years ago.

You can’t know that while you’re building something. You can’t see forward into the room where people will stand and say your name that way. My mother certainly didn’t. She was just doing the work, year after year, in a stone building on a quiet street in Montana.

There are photographs of my mother from those early years — ramrod-straight back, the posture of someone who knew exactly what she was doing. She moves a little differently now. Time does that. But she is, unmistakably, the same woman. The same precision. The same warmth underneath it. Still the person who built something that outlasted her tenure and became, in someone else’s hands, more than she imagined.

There is a particular pride of watching a parent be fully seen — not as your parent, but as someone who mattered to the world in ways you were only partially aware of.

Connie was the one who made me understand that. A stranger who wasn’t quite a stranger, standing in the room my mother built.

If something here landed differently than you expected — I’m reachable by reply.

This time my son had schoolwork. The day was clear. Great Harvest is only a bike ride away.

We sat across from each other at the table, both working. He had his iPad. I had my notes. I didn’t think much of it at first. It was just logistics. He needed somewhere to be; I needed somewhere to go.

What I didn’t expect was how much better the work got.

Same questions I always ask, same categories, same attempt at honesty. But I found myself going deeper into where I’d actually fallen short, and more genuinely grateful for what had landed. Something in the quality of attention had shifted. I wasn’t sure why.

At some point he looked up from his iPad.

“Dad, why are you smiling?”

“I’ll tell you later,” I said. And I meant it. I was still figuring it out myself.

What I was watching, I think now, was what Frog and Toad would call being alone together. Two people in the same room doing their own serious work, not requiring anything of each other and somehow lighter for it. The metacognition landed quietly: the camaraderie was working, and I could feel it working, and that was the smile.

I’ve spent years on rugby fields. Inside the referee tent at the end of a long day — everyone tired, honestly reporting how the round had gone — there was a quality of candor you couldn’t manufacture in an office. People held themselves to high standards, sometimes ferocious ones. But the reason they could hold those standards wasn’t the standards themselves. It was the low-level warmth of being in the same mess together. The camaraderie didn’t lower the bar. It made the bar feel worth clearing.

Sitting at Great Harvest with my son, something of that returned.

We talk a lot about the conditions for good reflection — solitude, structure, a dedicated ritual. And those things matter. But I wonder if we’ve been a little too certain that presence is a distraction. That the serious work happens alone.

I did tell him later. He nodded in the way kids nod when they’re filing something away for future reference.

Maybe what we need sometimes isn’t more quiet. Maybe it’s someone nearby doing their own serious thing.

If something here landed differently than you expected — I’m reachable by reply.

Targeting meetings are meant to be focused. Practical. A place to name what’s next and clear the path toward it.

I thought I was doing exactly that.

At the end of the meeting, I pivoted. The analyst has a long-standing professional goal. They know they need to reach, even if they haven’t exactly fallen in love with the pursuit of it. I’ve been nudging them toward it for a while. Sometimes thoughtfully. Sometimes like a pest. Sometimes with humor that probably landed better in my own head than it did across the screen.

On this particular day, I didn’t notice that they were not okay.

I don’t mean they were visibly falling apart. They weren’t. But something was off — the kind of off that you can feel in the pauses if you’re paying attention, in the flatness behind someone’s responses, in the way a person is holding themselves together by being very still. I wasn’t paying attention. I was running the meeting I had planned to run.

So I pressed. I made the case, again, for why they needed to be moving on this goal. For their career. For the firm. For the clients. I said the things I believed, from a place of genuine care, with the quiet confidence of someone who thought they were helping.

Then: “That’s really the least of my concerns right now.”

I heard it. I kept going anyway.

A few days later, the analyst reached out and apologized for not having the capacity to show up the way they wanted to in that meeting.

Gracious. More gracious than the situation required.

Because I was the one who needed to apologize. I hadn’t given them what they needed. I’d pressed someone publicly, in front of a colleague they were still building trust with, on a day when what they needed most was simply to be seen.

Leadership isn’t measured by what we want someone to need. It’s measured by what they actually need, in that moment, from us.

What the moment called for was simple. Close the loop with the new project manager. Thank the analyst, genuinely, for the work. End the meeting. And then, after, during a one-on-one: Where are you at? I know things have been heavy. What do you need right now?

That’s it. That was the whole job.

Leaders — and I include myself in this with no exemption — often operate from a kind of benevolent certainty. We know what someone needs. We’ve thought about it. We’ve watched them. We want good things for them. So we push. We remind. We circle back. We think that consistency is the same as support.

But support isn’t a monologue. It’s a read. It’s the ongoing, imperfect work of asking what this person, in this moment, actually needs from me — not what I’ve decided they need from a distance.

The analyst didn’t need a reminder that day. They needed to be seen, to be thanked, and to be quietly given a door to walk through if they needed space.

I missed that.

I’m better at this than I used to be. I’m also more aware, these days, of how much I still get it wrong. The gap between caring about someone and being useful to them in a given moment is wider than any of us like to admit. That gap is where the real leadership work lives.

If something here landed differently than you expected — I’m reachable by reply.