In my twenties I worked with a man who got fired over something he said. I’ll leave it there — it was his to carry and it isn’t mine to publish. Today it would be called an HR violation.

We both worked for the owner of the company. A client told the owner the man was careless and unkind, and that put the owner in a spot. Ultimately it cost the man his job, because the alternative was losing the client.

The owner started to adopt the client’s story. If that version was all I’d had, I’d have believed every word.

But I knew him. He was one of the sincerest people in that office and he was kind in ways nobody was keeping track of. He’d also grown up somewhere that hadn’t taught him where the lines were in a place like that one, and he crossed one, and it cost him his job.

I never argued that he shouldn’t have been fired. The mistake was real. What I couldn’t do was accept that the mistake was the man, because I had information the story didn’t contain.

Almost nobody else in that building did.

That’s the part that stayed with me. Not that the man had done wrong. That it got repeated as if it were all he was. The client, the owner, the office.

They weren’t being cruel. They had one account, from one person, delivered with authority, and no reason on earth to go looking for a second. Five people repeating it wasn’t five sources. It was one source with five mouths. From inside, that feels exactly like confirmation.

Here’s the thing I’ve noticed since, and it’s worse than plain repetition.

You’ve probably heard that “blood is thicker than water” is a butchered version of an older line — the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb — meaning the bonds you choose beat the family you were born into. Great story. Sounds like a hidden truth somebody’s been keeping from you.

It appears to be invented. The covenant version traces to a couple of authors in the nineties and two-thousands, neither of whom cited a source, and it doesn’t turn up in older texts at all. The actual proverb has always meant what you’d expect: family runs deep.

So the correction is the distortion, and the people passing it around are certain they’re the ones who saw through something.

That’s the sharper trap. It isn’t repeating what everybody says. It’s repeating the thing that let you feel like you’d stopped doing that.

I carried a misquoted Bible verse about money for most of my adult life and never once went and looked at it. When I finally did, one word was missing and it changed the whole meaning. I’d been wrestling with a sentence that was never the sentence.

Decades. Never checked. And I’d have told you I was a careful person.

There’s a live version of this running right now and it comes in a matched pair.

One crowd is selling seven prompts that will change your business. I use these tools every day and I read the prompts — they’re vague, overgeneralized, and will get you back something that sounds intelligent and says nothing. That’s the grift.

The other crowd has decided the whole thing is a bubble and none of it is real, and they roll their eyes and feel superior about it.

Both are handing you a conclusion you didn’t build. One says it’s magic, one says it’s nothing, and neither has any interest in you going to look. If you looked, you wouldn’t need either of them.

I still think about the guy sometimes.

There are people who worked in that building for years who never knew anything about him except the worst afternoon of his life, told by somebody else, and there was nothing in it that was untrue.

It just wasn’t him.

Friday I slept until after eight.

I’ve done that maybe twice in ten years. I’m up at 5:30 every day, not because anyone makes me — I like it, it’s the quietest part of the day and it belongs to me. But Friday I woke up at some point, looked at the clock, and went back under.

It took two weekends of practice to get there. First one I made myself stay in bed until seven and it felt like being late for something. Did it again the next day. Then Friday, eight.

What finally landed it wasn’t discipline. My wife looked at me and said, “You’re exhausted. Sleep in.”

Our team just brought a project across the line at work. Ten months of build, a go-live date that wouldn’t stick, the whole thing.

I want to be careful how I describe this, because I liked it. I’ve spent twelve years doing large project work and I’d take that kind of pressure any day — you plan a thing, you build it, and then people use it. That’s about as satisfying as work gets.

What wears on you isn’t the hours. It’s carrying, for ten months, the awareness that if this doesn’t hold, it doesn’t fail quietly. It fails at enterprise scale, in front of everyone, on Monday. You don’t put that down at 5 p.m. You just carry it at a lower volume.

And then it launches, and you’re still braced, because your body didn’t attend the meeting where we decided it was over.

I wrote something years ago about being in a current.

The idea was that most of the time being busy feels like water moving you along — responsibility, deadlines, the list, everyone counting on you. You put your head down and paddle to keep up, and after a while you stop noticing anything except the water.

And the current isn’t deep. That was the whole point of it. You can put your feet down and stand up in the middle of it any time you decide to. You can walk to the bank and watch it go by. It was never actually in charge.

I still believe that. What I’d add now is that standing up is not a thing I do by myself. Twice this month it took my wife on the bank telling me the water wasn’t as deep as I thought.

There’s an old Alabama song about being in a hurry and not knowing why.

I’ve had it stuck in my head, and not because it describes me. I’m not in a hurry to get my life over with. I like my life — I like being married to her, I like being my son’s dad, I like building things. When I catch myself rushing and can’t say what for, that’s not a mood. That’s information.

Because hurry and performance are not the same animal. When I’m performing I know the goal and I know why it matters and I can tell you which things don’t. Hurry is what shows up when I haven’t decided any of that, so everything arrives equally urgent and I just thrash. One is chosen. The other is drift wearing a productivity costume.

Here’s the bill.

I’m not dissatisfied with my life. But when I think honestly about what I’d want back, it isn’t projects and it isn’t time. It’s people. There are friendships I’d have built more deliberately. There are people I liked who I let drift because I was in the water with my head down and I’d have told you, sincerely, that I’d get to it.

Nobody isolates on purpose. You just stay busy long enough and the number of people you’re actually close to gets smaller, and no single week is when it happened.

That’s the real cost of the current. It doesn’t take your hours. It takes your people, slowly, while you’re being responsible.

Tomorrow morning it’s supposed to be sixty-eight degrees, which in Oklahoma on the second of August is close to a miracle.

I’m going to put headphones on and mow the yard before church. Listen to a book and drive around the lawn like it’s a go-kart. Same chore either way. The grass doesn’t care.

That’s about as far as I’ve gotten. Head up, feet down, and somebody on the bank who’ll tell me when I’ve stopped noticing the water.