This evening Mrs. Brekkie got cross with me. I'd stopped at the mailboxes on my way out to meet her and Prince Brekkie (🤣) at the park, grabbed the one piece of mail, and carried it outside. She asked what it was. I handed it over. It was a bill. We're a week behind on something.

Some background: we're navigating a season of financial uncertainty. Nothing catastrophic, just the kind of stretch everyone hits. It stresses her out. It doesn't stress me as much (not because I'm "more Stoic," I'm just not wired to worry about money). So she'd been having a rare non-stress moment in the park, and my space-cadet self walked a reminder of the stress right into it.

Mrs. Brekkie got upset and left, headed back home, me and little prince to continue playing outside.

I get it her reaction, I understand it. But my honest first reaction, in my head, was still: “who made the rule that you don't bring mail on an outing?”

Nobody did. But there was the expectation that you don’t, and no one ever told me about it.

Epictetus says we're disturbed not by things, but by our judgments about them. And expectations are judgments we never bother to share. I come home, see dishes in the sink, and think she was home all day, why didn't she do these? But did I ask? Did she agree? If not, the frustration is entirely my own manufacture, a rule I wrote and never published.

Agreements fix this because they live in the one place expectations don't: out loud, between two people, consented to. "Could you feed the dog while I'm out?" gives the other person room to say yes, or to renegotiate. And when something gets dropped, you have shared language for it instead of an emotional ambush.

Expectations are private opinions we resent others for failing to read. Stop assigning rules nobody agreed to. Make agreements instead.

See you Monday.