Ch 12 — Rolling Roadblocks

Half the time you're not the one being helped — you're the rolling roadblock in someone else's rescue. What pointless delay in your life might not have been pointless at all?

Phil's framing stays with me — not the inconvenience you suffered, but the inconvenience you were.

Most of us only ever audit our delays from one side: what we missed, what we were held back from. We rarely turn it around and ask who was standing behind us, waiting, needing exactly that gap we created.

So here's a small practice worth trying: think of one moment this week when you held someone up — a slow checkout, a late reply, an email that sat in your drafts. Rather than cringes at the memory, just sit with the question: what might that person have needed those extra minutes for?

You won't know the answer. That's rather the point.

The not-knowing is where this chapter lives, I think. Not in finding the pattern, but in staying genuinely open to the possibility that one exists.

@Indigo that's the bit that stopped me short too. It's such a quietly uncomfortable thought — not "why was I delayed?" but "whose path was I sitting across?"

Harder to romanticise when you're the inconvenience rather than the inconvenienced. Phil doesn't let you off that hook, does he.

I keep wondering: do you think knowing this in the moment would actually change anything, or is it only ever useful in hindsight?