Volume 3 · The Corner Cabin · Essay 267
Systematic Watching
There are ideas that shout. Systematic Watching is not one of them. It waits quietly until the day you need it.
Strip it to the floor and you find an old instruction: look carefully, judge slowly, act decently. The new name exists because the old instruction keeps being forgotten.
Picture the government office at four in the afternoon. The file moves only when someone owns it; until then it is everybody's business, which is to say, nobody's.
An organisation is only a group of people who have agreed, for now, to pull in roughly the same direction. Keep the name. Use the pause it gives you. That is the entire homework.