You ever been at one of those big, somber family events, like a funeral for a relative you haven’t seen in twenty years, and you’re supposed to be all choked up and reflective, but your mind is just… elsewhere? Like, the eulogy is going on, and it’s a lovely speech, really, talking about a life well-lived and all that, and you're nodding along, making the right facial expressions, but inside, you’re calculating the earliest you can reasonably slip out. Not because you’re a monster, you know? But because you’ve got a 3-hour drive ahead of you, and traffic's going to be a nightmare if you don't beat the rush. Is that awful? It feels awful to admit. I was at my second cousin, once removed's, funeral last week – lovely man, apparently – and I was standing there, listening to his son talk about his dad’s passion for woodworking, and all I could think about was the spreadsheet I needed to finish for a volunteer board meeting the next day. Like, if I could just get home, have a decent meal, and then spend an hour on that damn budget, I could sleep soundly. Otherwise, it’s a late night, and then I’m dragging the next day, and nobody wants *that*. It’s a completely ridiculous thing to be worrying about when someone's passed on, I know. It's like my brain just defaults to problem-solving, even when the problem is utterly irrelevant to the actual event. It's like a performance review for my own internal clock. And then you feel this HUGE wave of shame, right? Because here you are, a grown man, retired, ostensibly with all the time in the world, and you’re still so caught up in the minutiae of your own schedule that you can’t even give a solemn moment its due. It's not like I didn’t care for the man – I just didn’t *know* him. But that doesn’t excuse it, does it? Everyone else around me looked so genuinely sad, and I was just… trying to figure out if I had enough gas to bypass the next rest stop. It makes you wonder, you know, how many times in your life you’ve been physically present but mentally clocking out. It’s a lot, I bet. Probably more than I care to think about.