The unnamed coastline from which I’m writing this holds still in the flat light of late July. For a long moment there is nothing here but salt, heat, and the particular quality of attention that comes from having, for once, nowhere urgent to be and nothing vital or essential to do.
Then the drift begins. Not thought exactly — more like residue. An unanswered email surfaces first, the one about the interim report that was due Tuesday and still isn’t finished, though it exists in five separate drafts on five separate days, each one slightly more careful than the last, none of them sent.
A funding proposal, half-written, waiting in a folder that everyone involved already knows is not final. A line from a board memo drifts in — something about “stakeholder alignment” — and it sits there. Tidy and slightly hollow, the kind of phrase that means something different depending on who is holding it. And no one wants to own it.
This should arrive as a cause for worry. But it just plops like a pebble in a tide pool. Shallow, self-contained, visible only because the water has receded enough to expose them. The reports, the drafts, the memos — they will surfaces and recede on their own schedule, indifferent to whether anyone is paying attention. That indifference is, itself, worth noting, though there’s no name for it yet (at least not one I’ll admit to).
Having the the sensation of carrying something that keeps insisting it should be carried by someone else, or by no one, or by everyone at once — an audit conducted without a ledger, tallying nothing but the fact of its own persistence. Low tide arrives without announcement, the way certain truths do — not as event but as absence, the water pulling back to reveal what was underneath it the whole time.
The word “empower” pops up, dragging an entire Zoom call behind it. Forty minutes had been spent, once, debating whether a community program “empowered” its participants or merely “enabled” them — as though the distinction, hashed out by people who had never met the participants in question, might retroactively change what had actually happened in that room.
Someone had argued for “empower” on the grounds that it implied more agency. Someone else had argued for “enable” on the grounds that “empower” implied the organization had been withholding power all along, which, when you looked at the budget, wasn’t entirely untrue. The call ended without resolution. The final report used both words, in adjacent sentences, as if daring anyone to notice.
T-shirts come next — a memory of an evaluation meeting where the number of T-shirts distributed at a community event became, by some quiet consensus nobody remembers agreeing to, a proxy for trust. Not attendance. Not the conversations that happened at the tables afterward, or the woman who came back the following week because someone had actually listened to her the first time.
Just t-shirts. A hundred and forty of them, counted, logged, cited in the following quarter’s report as evidence of “deepened community relationships.” The relationships may well have deepened. The T-shirts had nothing to do with it, and everyone in the room seemed to understand that and file the number anyway.
Then the deck — sixty slides, prepared over three weeks, reviewed in five minutes by someone scrolling on a phone between meetings, who said, “looks good, ship it,” and hung up. Three weeks of language, compressed into a single verdict delivered in less time than it takes to read this sentence twice.
Nobody was wrong to do this. The person scrolling had four other decks waiting. The compression itself was the problem, or rather it wasn’t a problem so much as a condition — the water level at which most of this work is actually done.
I spot an updated file notice for another strategy document. An edit to a line in a paragraph about “systems change.” That line turns out, upon close reading, to be a paragraph someone wrote two organizations ago. Adapted two months ago. For a different funder. One that likely saw another a paragraph written for yet another funder before that— from the same organization.
No one stole anything. Nobody meant to. The language simply migrated, the way language does, carrying its assumptions along with it, until it was impossible to say where any given sentence in the current five-year plan had actually originated. Or whether “originated” itself was even the right word for what language does once enough hands have touched it.
Somewhere between the T-shirts and the inherited paragraph, a shape starts to form — not an answer, just the outline of a question that had apparently been waiting a long time to be asked properly. The Greeks had a name for a version of it: the Sorites paradox, the puzzle of the heap. Remove one grain of sand from a heap and it’s still a heap. Remove another, and another — at what exact grain does it stop being a heap and start being a scattering? There is no single grain.
That’s the whole, uncomfortable point. The heap doesn’t fail all at once. It thins, imperceptibly, until someone looks up and the thing that used to be obviously present is now obviously absent, and no one can point to the moment it changed.
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It turns out there’s a companion problem for credit, one without so tidy a name, though it might as well be called the Attribution Paradox: when forty people touch a strategy document over three years, who wrote it? Not who typed it — who is responsible for what it says, what it costs, what it fails to notice?
The honest answer is that responsibility, like the heap, doesn’t have a discrete owner. It has a distribution chain. And you and I know, from experience, such chains are much harder to put on a résumé than actual authorship is.
Maybe that’s why organizations and teams keep trying to figure out who’s responsible — a founder, a visionary, a “voice” — long after the actual work has become thoroughly, unglamorously collective and routine. It’s not like credit matters, again, until someone needs to be held accountable for what went wrong with the work everyone is now collectively invested in, right?
Peel and peek further in, and there’s another layer of something even less negotiable: the absence of a first cause. Ask when the program “really” began, and the honest answer keeps receding — before the grant, before the pilot, before the conversation that led to the pilot, before the person who had that conversation was hired, before the job existed, before the need the job was meant to address was even named as a need rather than simply lived. There is no first domino. There’s only an unbroken middle, all the way down.
It’s a structure the philosophers Deleuze and Guattari once called a rhizome, an underground root system with no center and no edge, nothing but connections extending in every direction, which makes it, among other things, a remarkably efficient anti-credit machine: ask a rhizome who’s in charge and it has no mechanism for answering.
None of this explains anything. It doesn’t need to. What it does is quieter and, in its way, more useful: it gives a shape to something that had been felt correctly and named wrongly for a very long time — mistaken, usually, for burnout, or for someone else’s failure to acknowledge the work, or for a personal shortcoming in the art of being noticed. It was never that. It was structural the whole time.
A full tidal cycle takes approximately 12 hours and 25 minutes globally. If I do the math right, it should take roughly 6 hours to reach high tide. The fundamental wait time for a new tide to come in remains the same. Six hours for the tide to transition from an extreme low to a natural high. The water should begin rising immediately. If I wait long enough.
Sisyphus shows up first, uninvited, the way an old colleague does when he hears you’re finally talking about the thing you’ve both been living for years. He doesn’t come with the boulder story everyone already knows — the punishment, the futility, the existentialist reading where the trick is to imagine him happy.
He comes instead with the specific, unglamorous posture of someone who pushed the same proposal up the same hill in three different fiscal years, watched it roll back down each time for reasons that had nothing to do with the proposal’s quality, and pushed it back up anyway, not out of delusion but out of something closer to professional dignity.
The recognition that the pushing itself was the job, and that the summit, if it ever came, would belong to whoever happened to be standing there when the funding finally cleared, which might not be him. He isn’t bitter about this. He’s mostly just tired, and mildly amused that it took several thousand years for anyone to write down the part where the hill work is actually the whole career.
Tantalus arrives next, up to his neck in something that keeps receding whenever he reaches for it — the metrics, this time, rather than water or fruit. Every quarter produces a new dashboard, a new key performance indicator, a new definition of “impact” more legible than the last one, and every time the goalposts are met, someone upstream decides the goalposts weren’t quite the right measurement after all, and a new evaluative horizon opens up just out of reach.
It isn’t cruelty, exactly. At least not intentional cruelty. It’s more of an institutional reflex: the belief that measurement, taken far enough, will eventually produce certainty, when in practice it mostly produces more measurement. Tantalus knows this better than anyone. He’s been reaching for the same branch for three thousand years and has developed, in that time, a fairly dry sense of humor about it.
Narcissus is the one nobody expected to relate to, and yet there he is, not admiring himself so much as trapped by the expectation that he should be visible at all — the designated face of an organization built by dozens of hands, expected in every grant report and board deck to personify a collective effort as though it were a single coherent story with a single coherent protagonist.
The pool he’s staring into isn’t vanity. It’s the job description: be the human the funders can picture, the leader the media can quote, the “voice” of a system too distributed and too unglamorous to put on a letterhead. He didn’t ask to become the face of something larger than himself. He just noticed, one day, that everyone kept pointing a camera at the water and expecting him to hold still.
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The coast widens without announcing that it’s widening — geography simply gets larger, the way understanding sometimes does, without a signpost marking the border it just crossed.
At the edge of one such border, in Tijuana, a Mexican army private named Juan Castillo Morales was executed in 1938. Accused of the brutal murder of a child, the military executed him via the ley de fugas (the "law of fugitives")—a quasi-lynching arrangement where a prisoner was given a head start and then shot in the back.
The investigation was hasty and military authorities faced intense pressure from a rioting mob demanding swift justice, doubts immediately swirled regarding his confession and guilt. Ordinary people and migrants have made a pilgrimage of his grave, less interested in resolving his guilt than in finding a mirror for their own encounters with arbitrary forces.
The child, eight-year-old Olga Camacho, was virtually forgotten by the public and the authorities for decades while the accused killer’s legend grew, until a quiet, shifting reverence reclaimed her narrative. Stolen innocence and raw grief transformed Santa Olguita into a permanent source of primal vigilance and protective grace. The true authorship of the horror was never fully settled by a corrupt state; attribution, unresolved, became a sanctuary for the scapegoat, and rage, channeled, created a vocabulary of survival.
Along the Amazon, there’s a story about a girl named Mani. She was a beloved, fair-complexioned girl and granddaughter of a powerful chief. Following her sudden and unexplainable death, the grief-stricken village buried her in the floor of her oca (dwelling) and watered her grave with their tears. From the freshly turned soil grew an unfamiliar plant. When the villagers unearthed the dark, robust roots, they found the inner flesh as pristine and light as Maní’s skin. Unfamiliar and startling, this mystery became nourishment, feeding the whole village indefinitely. No one names Mani when they eat mandioca today. The root outlived the credit entirely and simply became the food to sustain the people.
On the plains shared by Venezuela and Colombia, a cursed spirit called El Silbón wanders the grasslands forever, condemned to carry a sack of his father’s bones and to count them, over and over, an inventory that never resolves because a bone is always missing and always must be searched for again — an eternity of reconciliation that never reconciles.
Higher, where the Amazonian basin folds up into the sharp edges of the Colombian Andes, a one-legged spirit called La Patasola guards the cloud forest against those who take without asking, luring the guilty deeper into the trees with a beauty that dissolves the moment they’re close enough to be caught — an evaluative horizon with teeth.
In the mines of the high Andes, miners still leave coca and alcohol for a goblin called the Muqui, a spirit who might guide them to a rich vein of ore or might just as easily bury them alive, depending on an accounting of respect that is never quite settled and must be renewed, offering after offering, forever.
And in stories carried along the rivers of the Amazon basin, a hummingbird is singled out among all the birds to become messenger between the human world and something larger — small enough to be overlooked, visible enough that every bird that wasn’t chosen has reason to resent it.
The patterns wash into me independently all of a sudden. You know the way patterns tend to when you’re writing about one thing while thinking about another. A symptom, a condition — labor without visible origin, evaluation without resolution, credit without an owner — just erupts as conflict, instead of emerging as idea readily formed and packaged for convenient sharing.
I’m still struggling to fully capture and explain what it’s like to be a person doing sustained, difficult work inside something larger than any one person can see. Inside systems designed to frustrate and stymie. Refined to perpetuate work and combat, not peace or rest.
I know it’s difficult for my clients and colleagues and competitors. I need to admit just how difficult it is for me. There’s nothing to be lost for sharing it openly and honestly in my work. It just may wind up lightening the load I feel I carry.
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Somewhere past the myths, past the ghosts and goblins, there’s a different kind of relief altogether — not another cautionary figure, but an actual alternative grammar for how responsibility might be organized in the first place.
I’m reaching back years and recalling an Islamic principle, shura, where legitimacy is generated not by a single decision-maker but through consultation. A distributed process in which authority belongs to the deliberation itself rather than to whoever happens to be sitting at the head of the table when the decision is announced. It’s a different answer to the Attribution Paradox than the one most Western institutions default to — not “who gets credit” but “who was consulted,” which turns out to be an easier question to answer honestly.
Alongside it sits fard kifayah, the idea of a communal obligation that is satisfied once enough members of the community have fulfilled it, releasing everyone else from individual culpability for a duty that still, collectively, got done. Feed the hungry, bury the dead, educate the young — someone has to do it, but not everyone has to do it personally, and once it’s done, the obligation dissolves for the group as a whole.
If I sit with them both along with everything else in my mind today, I feel something that’s more deeply collaborative when it comes to collective accountability. A shift of the moral burden I naturally assume for everything. A move away from absolute individualism and top-down control. Maybe, just maybe, a tilt if not a full lean, that distributing responsibility across my ecosystem— my community— while maintaining a higher standard of care and and sense justice. To myself as well as to those around me, and those around them.
It’s a strange kind of comfort, reading that principle after a morning spent chasing individual authorship through inherited paragraphs and unresolved metrics: the reminder that other traditions built entire ethical and legal systems around the plain fact that most necessary work is done by some people, on behalf of everyone, without requiring that any one person carry the whole of it alone.
By the time the light starts to slant, the tide has come most of the way back in, filling the pools it left exposed that morning, and there’s a particular, unhurried satisfaction in packing up a beach chair that has done nothing all day but hold a body that was, for once, allowed to just sit with all of this instead of solving it.
I don’t have a framework to offer at the end of all this. That’s probably worth saying plainly, since it would be easy, coming out of a day like this one, to reach for a tidy close — a model, a takeaway, three lessons for funders
And I’d be lying if I pretended that’s what a beach, or a myth, or a goblin who wants coca leaves actually gives you. What they give you, if anything, is company. The recognition that the friction was never a personal failing, and that plenty of traditions, long before anyone wrote a strategic plan, had already worked out that credit is a poor unit for measuring work that never had a single owner to begin with.
So I’ll leave it where it actually sits, unresolved, the way the tide leaves the sand each evening — rearranged, not explained.
Where, exactly, did this begin — the program, the paragraph, the sense that you personally are supposed to hold together something that was built by fifty hands before you arrived?
Whose obligation was it, really, before it became yours?
And when the heap of sand has thinned down to almost nothing and someone finally asks whether it’s still a heap, who in the room gets to answer that, and on whose authority?
Those aren’t rhetorical. Take them back with you.
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