There was a homeless man at the coffee shop, but it was difficult to tell he was homeless because of all his computer equipment. Only when he stepped out from behind the keyboards could you see he was wearing bright green knee-high boots.

His table was covered in piles of paper, and over and over again the wind picked up the top sheets of paper and scattered them across the gravel walk. Over and over again he got up to collect the pieces of paper, some of which looked like children’s drawings, takeout menus, densely written pages of notes. Every time he got up to gather the pages, a different set of pages blew off the table. She sat for thirty minutes and watched as he rose to gather the pages, over and over. She thought to herself that she could describe the ritual as Sisyphean, but that wasn’t very interesting.

She considered what he was doing in light of the idea that what people do is what they like to do. If what people do is what they like to do, or if people arrange situations in ways they want them to be arranged, then he must want to get up over and over all day to pick up his papers. She thought that some people might say this point of view was callous. When she had talked about this idea with a therapist, the therapist had been adamant that this wasn’t true. People didn’t do what they wanted to do, the therapist had said, people do what they know. But this, she thought, almost drove her point home with more emphasis. Who “knows” letting a stack of papers blow around in the wind all day for the express purpose of picking them up? The situation gave him power – some agency in his day. It was naïve not to assign him credit for that. It was naïve, it was stingy. It was part of, if not the therapist’s way of looking at the world, then the institution that sat behind her, which wanted every action, trait, and decision to be ascribed to or blamed on a force greater than oneself. Everything was about offloading the blame or the responsibility. She was getting angry again just thinking about responsibility. Her hand dented a plastic cup. Out of nothing, this man had created an office and a job — the commissioner of gathering loose papers scattered by the wind on a gravel drive.