I hit a woman in the head with my backpack.
It was an accident. I apologized. And when she stayed furious, I remember thinking, What else do you want from me? I said I was sorry.
That was years ago. Last month, I did it again.
I travel about forty times a year, which means I spend a lot of time watching people lose their minds in airports.
Group one is boarding, but group four has formed a human wall around the gate. The flight attendant asks everyone to stay seated so passengers with tight connections can get off first, and the aisle fills anyway. At baggage claim, people crowd the carousel so closely you’d think the bags were being handed out to whoever touched them first.
And can we talk about the soundtrack? The phone conversation on speaker. The FaceTime call at full volume. The endless chirps and videos from someone scrolling three seats away. Headphones are widely available and inexpensive. The rest of us did not buy a ticket to your feed.
Then there’s the slow drift. I don’t expect everyone to power walk through the terminal. But for the love of all that is holy, if you need to check your phone, step to the side. Don’t wander down the middle of the concourse at half speed with six people trapped behind you.
I’ve had an elbow in my ribs and a stranger’s ass in my face. I’ve watched someone plant themselves in front of the carousel, stare past three rotations of luggage, and block the person whose bag is actually coming.
I can get pretty worked up about it.
Then I remember the backpack. Both of them.
The first time, I swung around in a corridor without checking who was behind me. I heard the woman gasp before I fully understood what I’d done. She was hurt. She was angry. And while I was saying “I’m sorry,” part of me was already asking her to make me feel better.
I wanted her to understand I hadn’t meant it. I wanted the apology accepted so I could go back to being a decent person who’d made a mistake.
She was still standing there with a sore head.
My intent mattered to me. The impact belonged to her.
Researchers Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris found that when people focus hard on one task, they can miss something striking happening right in front of them. They call it inattentional blindness. Their study wasn’t conducted in an airport, but anyone who has raced to a gate while checking a connection time knows how small the world gets.
That explains how I got careless. It doesn’t make her head hurt less.
And here’s the part I’m less proud of. How righteous I am when I’m the one being harmed. But when I’m the one doing the harming, I expect grace.
The carousel blocker gets no mercy from me. The woman holding her head was supposed to give me plenty.
You do this too. Maybe not with a backpack.
You walk into a meeting already composing your response and miss the person trying to raise a concern. Your kid asks a question while you’re rushing out the door, and you hear it as one more delay. You’re on deadline, so you take over the shared space, the conversation, someone else’s afternoon, and never notice what you took.
Nobody sets out to be that person. That’s the point. Most of the harm we cause happens while we’re busy starring in our own day.
Sometimes someone tells you. Sometimes they tell you angrily. And your first instinct will be to defend the person you believe yourself to be. I’m considerate. I didn’t mean it. I already said sorry.
“Sorry” opens the conversation. It doesn’t entitle you to close it.
So the next time someone is still upset after you’ve apologized, skip the question Why are they still mad?
Ask, What happened to them while I was busy explaining myself?
Maybe you swung a backpack into their head. Maybe you blocked the aisle when they had six minutes to make a connection. Maybe you took up all the room in a conversation and called it enthusiasm.
You’ll still get distracted. You’ll still be tired and late and occasionally convinced the boarding process would run better if everyone just listened to you. I know I will.
But you can check before you turn.
That’s where it starts: the instant someone’s reaction makes it impossible to pretend you were the only person in the room.
This is your moment of reckoning. Step into it.
