While walking Hudson recently, I dropped my iPhone. When it landed on the edge of the sidewalk, it made a particular kind of crackling sound that I knew didn’t mean anything good. When I picked it up and turned it over to look at the screen, I saw a crack on the lower right side, with a web of cracks stretching across most of the phone.
Here’s the part that surprised me: I wasn’t upset.
Not in a noble, deep-breathing, I-have-done-the-work way. I mean, I noticed the problem, thought huh, okay, and went to make coffee. Ten years ago—five, even—that same problem would have taken my whole afternoon hostage. I’d have replayed it. I’d have thought about all the ways this shouldn’t have happened. Hudson would have gotten a walk that was really just me pacing with a dog attached.
Instead: huh, okay. Coffee.
I’ve been trying to work out where that came from.
The easy explanation is grief, and the easy explanation isn’t wrong. Sitting in a hospital waiting room for twelve hours does something permanent to your sense of proportion. When Ken was sick, I learned to sort the world into two piles very quickly—things that were actually happening and things that were merely annoying—because I didn’t have the bandwidth to treat them the same. After he died, that sorting mechanism stayed installed—and receives regular updates, it appears. It’s one of the few things grief hands you that’s genuinely useful.
But that’s not the whole story, because for years afterward I still lost entire days to small indignities. I once had a property management guy call and accuse me of not paying rent I had absolutely paid, and I stewed. Loudly. To an empty apartment. (“What a dick,” I said, to no one, about a man who was mostly just doing his job badly.) Grief had recalibrated what counted as a catastrophe, but it hadn’t touched my fuse at all.
Something else did that. And I think it was the work.
For a long stretch of my life, I spent my best hours on things that weren’t mine. I’m not going to pretend it was misery—there were good people, real friendships, a paycheck that let me build a life. But the stakes were always somebody else’s stakes. The deadline was urgent because someone upstream had decided it was urgent. The crisis was a crisis because it appeared on a slide labeled Crisis. And when the actual meaning of your day is that thin, every disruption to it feels enormous. There’s nothing underneath to absorb the shock.
That’s the thing nobody tells you about meaningless work: it makes you fragile. Not because it’s hard, but because it isn’t. When the work doesn’t matter, the friction is all you’ve got. The broken printer becomes the whole point. The passive-aggressive reply-all becomes your personality for a Tuesday. You are, in a very real sense, looking for something to feel—and the only thing on offer is irritation.
I don’t have that problem anymore. Not because my days are smoother. They’re objectively messier. I’m running my own everything now: the writing, the coaching, the events, the shipping, the website that periodically decides to reinvent itself without consulting me. There is more that can go wrong on a random Wednesday than there ever was in a corporate job with an IT department and an org chart.
But it’s all pointed at something.
Ken used to say “right now is all we’re guaranteed,” in that deep voice that made it sound less like a bumper sticker and more like a dare. He also said “enjoy the journey,” which I found borderline insufferable at the time and now catch myself repeating out loud, alone, like a man who has become his husband’s tote bag.
What I’ve come to understand is that both of those only work if the journey is actually going somewhere you chose. It’s much more difficult to enjoy a journey you were assigned.
Now, when something goes wrong, it goes wrong inside work I care about. The shipment that got delayed was a shipment of my book. The tech that failed was tech for an event where I got to sit in a room with people who wanted to talk about their person. The problem is real, so it gets treated like a problem—handled, solved, moved past—instead of like an insult.
Purpose is a shock absorber. That’s the whole thesis. I didn’t get more patient; I got more cushioned.
There’s a second piece, too, and it’s less flattering to me.
Grief work is a permanent recalibration device. Every conversation resets the meter. It’s not that nothing bothers me; it’s that I keep getting reminded, professionally and repeatedly, what “bad” actually looks like.
I don’t recommend acquiring this particular perspective the way I acquired it. But I’d be lying if I said I wanted to give it back.
So: more patient at fifty-something than I was at forty. Not wiser, exactly. Not calmer, either—ask anyone who’s watched me try to park.
Just working on things that are mine, which turns out to be the difference between a bad day and a bad hour.
If you’re in a season where every small thing feels like the last straw, I’d gently suggest the problem might not be your temperament. It might be that nothing you’re doing is load-bearing. That’s fixable. Slowly, and probably not this month—but fixable.
Write on!
Ron Stempkowski is the author of The Luck We Carry: Love, Loss, and the Stories That Shape Us, a memoir-in-essays about learning to move with grief instead of moving on. If this story resonated, you can grab a signed copy—complete with a handwritten note—at ronstempkowski.com, or get your copy wherever books are sold. And if you'd like more stories like this one, join the journey and get them straight in your inbox.
I completely get what you are saying! Thank you for reminding me how meaningful work changes everything.