A line of cars heading into an industrial park got under my skin one morning. I knew what I was looking at, but I wasn’t sure why it bothered me so much.
It Started With a Line of Cars
My son Daniel started working at a factory about a month ago. Kelly and I take him to work in the mornings, which means driving into an industrial park in Walesboro, Indiana, with a lot of other people heading toward their shifts.
I kept noticing the traffic. One long line of cars, close together, moving at about the same high rate of speed. The flow seemed slightly aggressive, as though everyone knew how this drive was supposed to go and nobody wanted anything getting in the way.
To me, it looked like the assembly line started before they reached the factory.
The scene sent my mind straight to routine, comfort, and complacency. I’ve always had trouble understanding why someone would spend a life maintaining what already exists without asking what else they could become.
I was frustrated. My first reaction was, “What the fuck are people doing?” But I wanted more than a complaint. I wanted to understand why that pattern bothered me.
I believe life should involve learning, growing, becoming more capable, and helping others do the same. That’s why I build routines around training, writing, and learning new things. Repetition itself doesn’t bother me. I want to know what it is doing for the person repeating it.
Was I trying to figure those people out, or myself? Both, probably. But the more I thought about it, the more I wondered how I had become someone who paid this much attention to behavior.
Looking back, the connection was there. Recovery, loss prevention, law enforcement, and helping people had all required me to observe. I just hadn’t recognized what years of doing that had taught me.
The First Person I Had to Watch Was Me
After addiction, I had a lot of evaluating to do. Stopping drinking and using drugs changed my direction, but I still had to deal with the person making the decisions. I couldn’t assume that getting sober had automatically made every habit, reaction, and explanation trustworthy.
I’d spent years doing things that damaged my life while finding ways to continue doing them. I knew what it was like to want relief badly enough to defend the behavior that kept creating more problems. I also knew how little a promise meant when my actions kept contradicting it.
Rebuilding required me to notice that contradiction in myself. What was I actually doing? What was I avoiding? Was I making a necessary adjustment, or giving myself permission to stop doing something I needed to do? Those questions mattered because I had already lived with the consequences of refusing to answer them honestly.
That didn’t mean I suddenly understood myself. Some things became clear only after I repeated a mistake or saw the effect my behavior had on somebody else. There were explanations I wanted to believe because accepting them would have been easier than changing.
Over time, keeping myself in check became part of how I lived. The question wasn’t only whether I was staying sober. It was whether the way I worked, treated people, trained, and handled responsibility matched the person I said I wanted to become.
Someone once told me I was the most self-aware person they knew. I appreciated that, but I don’t think it happened because I was born especially good at looking inward. My best explanation is that I had a strong reason to practice. I couldn’t afford to keep taking my own excuses at face value.
And I’m not finished with that work. I’ve had to examine how much of my identity I gave to a job, how my intensity affected my family, and whether something I could endure was still worth enduring. Being able to explain myself doesn’t make every decision I make a good one.
Looking back now, that was part of my education in behavior. Before I was trying to understand why somebody else kept repeating a destructive choice, I had to face how often I’d done it myself.
Loss Prevention Gave Me a Different Reason to Pay Attention
When I worked in loss prevention, watching people had a specific purpose. I needed to determine whether someone was stealing. At the time, I didn’t think of that as studying human behavior. I thought of it as doing my job.
I watched what people did, followed the situation, and had to know what my observations actually supported. Being interested in someone wasn’t the same as having grounds to make contact. I needed more than a feeling that something looked wrong.
That work kept my attention on actions. What had I seen? What happened next? What information was still missing? The job wasn’t just spotting something unusual. It was following through carefully enough to understand what I was dealing with.
I worked at a clothing retailer and later at a grocery store in downtown Indianapolis. Those jobs included apprehensions, resistance, and working with police officers. The situation changed once I made contact, because now I was part of what the other person was responding to.
Once an encounter started, I had to keep watching. What I’d seen before contact couldn’t tell me exactly how someone would respond when I approached them.
I was stabbed twice during loss-prevention apprehensions. That was a hard reminder that even when I’d been paying attention, an encounter could still turn dangerous.
What I recognize now is the repetition. Shift after shift, I was practicing noticing behavior, considering what it might mean, and making decisions with consequences. I was learning something that would stay with me after I stopped working in stores.
Law Enforcement Made the Questions Bigger
In law enforcement, the scene around a person mattered as much as the person. I had to consider what was happening, who was involved, and who else might be affected by what happened next.
Was someone going to resist? Could the situation turn violent? Was I safe? Were the other people there safe? Were civilians around me at risk while I was trying to do my job? Those weren’t interesting questions to discuss afterward. They were responsibilities I had in the moment.
My attention had to move between people and the wider situation. I couldn’t become so focused on the person directly in front of me that I stopped considering everyone else. I also had to pay attention to what my own actions were contributing.
I’ve written about why I loved police work, including the investigations, the responsibility, and the process of finding someone. Part of the appeal was having information to work through. I enjoyed trying to understand what it meant and deciding what to check next.
But enjoying that process didn’t make my first interpretation correct. A lead was something to investigate. An account was something to hear and, where possible, check. I still needed facts that supported what I put in a report.
In one investigation, a man told me a protective order was no longer in effect. I checked, and he was right. Other questions remained, but I couldn’t ignore the part of his explanation that had been confirmed just because the situation still concerned me.
That distinction matters outside police work too. Learning something that complicates your first impression isn’t a failure of observation. Refusing to account for it would be.
Looking back at those years, I can see another part of the development. Loss prevention gave me repeated practice watching actions. Law enforcement required me to widen that attention, consider what could happen next, and remain responsible for what I did with the information.
Helping People Asked Something Else of Me
My own recovery and my interest in helping people were already part of me during those jobs. I could have a conversation about addiction with someone I arrested while still carrying out the assignment. Those parts of my life weren’t sealed off from each other.
Recovery work brought a different purpose to observing behavior. I wasn’t simply trying to establish what happened or whether an encounter was safe. I was trying to understand what might help someone change.
A person could say they wanted a different life and still keep doing things that worked against it. I recognized that contradiction because I’d lived it. But recognizing something familiar didn’t mean I knew everything about that person’s reasons.
I had to listen as well as watch. What did they say they wanted? What were they actually doing? What happened when they tried to change something? What were they willing to take responsibility for? The answers mattered more than whether I could give an impressive speech about my own recovery.
There was a limit to what my experience could do. It gave me something useful to draw on, but another person wasn’t a copy of me. I could understand part of a struggle and still need to learn about the person having it.
Helping also required me to examine my own frustration. I believe people are capable of changing because I changed. Sometimes that belief makes it difficult to watch someone continue making choices they say they don’t want to make.
Still, wanting change for someone doesn’t tell me what they understand, what they are prepared to do, or where they need help. I had to work with the person in front of me, not the version of them I thought they should already have become.
That added another reason to stay interested in behavior. I wanted to understand what made change happen, what interfered with it, and how to help without taking over the responsibility that belonged to somebody else.
The Person Watching Needed Examination Too
I had watched a line of cars and quickly built a much bigger picture of the people driving them. Their speed and following distance were things I saw. What kind of lives they were living was something I had imagined.
A pattern gives me something to investigate. It doesn’t give me permission to fill in the rest of someone’s life.
I might be right that the driving reflected impatience, but I couldn’t know what those people were doing with the rest of their lives. I’d learned that difference on the job. I needed to apply it to myself too.
That didn’t make my frustration disappear. It made me ask why the scene had stayed with me after the drive was over.
Part of the answer was my history. I’d dug myself out of addiction and rebuilt a life that people didn’t think I could rebuild. I knew how far a person could move from where they started. The possibility of someone never exploring their own capacity bothered me.
But there was something personal in it too. I’d spent years determined not to return to a life ruled by avoidance and escape. When I thought I saw people operating without examining their direction, I was reacting to something I had worked hard to challenge in myself.
I can ask hard questions about other people, but I have to be willing to ask them about myself. What did I actually see? What did I assume? Was I learning something, or just feeding my own frustration?
The Interest Stayed After the Assignment Ended
In all those jobs, observing people had a purpose. I was responsible for decisions, safety, or helping someone change. Now the same habit shows up when nobody’s asking anything of me.
I can take Daniel to work, notice how a line of cars moves, and spend my morning thinking about why people behave the way they do. Nobody asked me to investigate anything. I just find it interesting.
At 50, I find that interesting in itself. I’ve written about how many different chapters I’ve lived, but the connection here isn’t another job title. It’s something those chapters have left in the way I pay attention.
I live the way I do partly because I want other people to see that change is possible. I write because some of what I’ve experienced might help someone else. I still have little patience for complacency and excuse-making, including my own.
But being useful requires more than being certain. I need to be able to examine my own conclusions with the same seriousness I bring to someone else’s behavior. Otherwise, I could spend a lot of time talking about growth while protecting my own thinking from it.
I thought I was trying to understand the people in those cars. What I hadn’t understood was how much of my own life had taught me to watch them.