Toniq

I was watching where the sea lion was, and now was not when everything went quiet. Then, directly in front of me, not more than an arm’s length away, three humpback whales came to the surface. One followed the other in quick succession. They took a deep breath, hung at the surface for a moment, unafraid of the boats full of gawkers around them, and then slowly, oh so gracefully, they returned to the depths.

She kept climbing onto the desk and saying, “Au-dessus de.” Then she kept jumping down, standing beside it, and saying, “À côté de.” Again and again, until the difference finally landed in all of us.

The fool was never just an entertainer. The court paid for a clown and got something stranger in return: a man whose job was to walk into the most powerful room in the kingdom and tell the most powerful person in the kingdom that he was being an idiot. In verse.

Because when basic human decency starts to feel rare enough to astonish us, we’re no longer just witnessing kindness. We’re seeing what it means to live in a culture where ordinary goodness no longer feels ordinary. It feels like evidence from another time.

What troubles me now has very little to do with oversharing or vanity. It’s not the selfies, the opinions, or the endless updates. It’s the way social media has trained us to look at another human being’s worst moment and see, not a person in pain, but a piece of content.

So, in my bleary-eyed morning state, I am going to write about National Women’s History Month. Women were given the right to vote in 1919, and the law was ratified in 1920. However, if you look at the history of the suffrage movement, you’ll see that the whole thing started in the 1800s. More than a century later, women could finally go to their local voting place and express their views on who should be running this place.

Well, one reason might be human beings, their needs and wants. Do we want our jobs to be taken over by algorithms? The Luddites asked the same questions as they headed into the Industrial Revolution. With technology, there is always the question of just because we can do it, does that mean we should do it?

I am sure that psychologists would have a field day with this pattern in my life. The desire to be organized, taking steps to get organized, and then being inundated by a lack of organization to the point of not being able to find the desk calendar.

The nap has gotten a lot of crap of late, mostly because being tired has become, like everything else, politicized. So now, for some reason, sleeping is a sign of weakness or a lack of leadership skills or something. I’m not sure what.

This piece, obviously, will be about tribal knowledge, the pros and cons of it in working in an office or a business, and how to handle it. But let’s first define it so we’re all on the same page.

An interview isn’t hard because it’s complex. It’s hard because it’s exposed. Someone is waiting on you. There’s a purpose attached to the conversation. There might be a recording light on. There’s a little clock somewhere counting down, even if you can’t see it. All of that pulls the task out of muscle memory and drags it into conscious thought.

Feeling safe in life, especially at work, is vital to helping employees do their best. Feeling safe also engenders feelings of peace and ease, trust and freedom to fail, because we all have to fail before we can do better.

Making a resolution puts pressure on us and then, if we fail, we feel worse, and usually we go deeper into our vice. If you resolve to drink less in the new year and you find yourself on the couch with a tumbler of bourbon on a Saturday afternoon, you may suddenly think, well, I failed at that, may as well go all in.

The world has a funny way of romanticizing creativity. Everyone loves the shiny parts — the brainstorms, the lightbulb moments, the finished product that looks effortless. Nobody celebrates the half-awake part, the blank screen, the twenty minutes you spend trying to remember your own password before you even start. But that’s the real creative life

Perfection has a way of sneaking in through the side door. It rarely announces itself as fear. It dresses up as high standards, professionalism, or artistic integrity. It tells you that if you just tweak a little more, fix that one small thing, get the phrasing right, then you’ll finally be ready. But ready never comes.