It’s always interesting to see which words and images people choose to illustrate their positions.

The slipperiest parts tend to be imagery, analogue, and history. Do any of those mean what the speaker thinks they mean?

More subtly, it’s worth mulling over the verbs and attributions. Did anyone cause something to happen, or did events simply “occur” as if by force majeure? Did or does anyone have a choice in the matter? Is anyone to praise to to blame?

The facts aren’t in question.

What’s in question is what the facts mean: how the dots connect, and the story we’ll tell ourselves about the picture we see.

These are questions of culture. They’re questions of what loyalty means, and which loyalties should prevail.

They’re questions about the short term vs. the long term, personal interest vs. group interest, and how we respond to facts like these.

The facts are the facts. We’re still entitled to choose what they mean for us, and what they’ll mean about us.

It’s the super-habit. The ultimate practice. The killer app.

If you’re more persistent and consistent than the rest, you’ll be fine.

The paradox is that most of us can only be that way for a limited number of people and projects.

The temptation to overcommit is limitless, and it will usually whisper to you as if each new commitment is an opportunity to show up and serve another person. That’s exactly what we like to hear (especially those of us who are pleasers), but it’s the fast track to overwhelm and under-delivery.

The antidote is what Michael Bungay Stanier calls the strategic question: “If I’m saying ‘yes’ to this, what am I saying ‘no’ to?”

Audit and budget your commitments. Then spend what you’ve budgeted — and not more.

Just like a real budget, that will put you way ahead of the pack.

The thing about action is that it’s generally imperfect.

But inaction isn’t cost-free, even if it’s tempting in the short run.

Sooner or later, you have to decide: are the costs of doing something to the best of your knowledge and ability really higher than the long-run costs of doing nothing at all?

Meeting with disagreement, disagreeableness, or downright “irrational” behavior, there are three good questions to ask:

First, how is the other person correct? Statistically speaking, they’re probably not psychotic or a true sociopath — so they’re not making an obviously wrong, harmful, or inconsistent decision in their own minds. They might not be right, but there’s not much ground for conversation until you can understand what ground they’re standing on.

Second, where’s the fear? Most of the time, apparently irrational behavior stems from fear. Listen closely enough to find that and you’ll go a long way toward understanding what’s really driving the conversation.

Third, where can we go from here — and how? This is the question that prevents empathy from turning into groundless relativism. Listening to understand does not require agreement, but nor does it allow for compulsion.

Neither stridency nor just the facts are effective at moving people past their fears. Instead, they have to be enrolled — reminded of other genuine values that transcend the ones they’re fixated on while standing in a place of fear.

There’s only one article worth talking about this week: the Afghanistan Papers recently published by the Washington Post.

Granted, there have been a few other interesting events this week, but the Afghanistan Papers are essential reading for their sourcing, their synthesis of almost two decades of breathtakingly bad policy-making and execution, and their demonstration of the value of a free and unfearful press.

The papers also beg some uncomfortable questions about our society. Though they put a little finer point on the scale of the disaster, it’s pretty hard to conceive of even portions of a trillion dollars’ worth of mismanagement. And it should have been obvious to most thinking people that the on-the-ground reality didn’t match the official rhetoric.

Why, then, are we still tolerating this level of mess after five terms, three presidents, and counting?

Part of feeling OK is feeling reasonably confident in FDR’s “four freedoms:” freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.

For the past three-quarters of a century, at least those of us in the West have become accustomed to our governments providing these freedoms reasonably (and, often, progressively) well.

Freedoms of speech and religion are still largely intact. But freedom from want and fear is not being adequately managed by governments — certainly not at the national level.

That leads to a few predictions:

First, government (and/or political theater, which is often confused for government) may continue to be a source of want or fear for some citizens for some time. The upside looks limited, but we still have to be alert to the enormous downside risks that only governments can run. (Trade wars, shutdowns, and shooting wars are good examples.)

Second, the future is local and networked. We’ll never forget the experience of globalization, but communities will have to band together in order to deal with global competition and social anomie.

Third, that means a lot more of us will have to take responsibility for “creating our own freedom,” as a friend of mine calls it. Utopianism — communist, isolationist, survivalist, or any other variety — isn’t really a viable option. Instead, we’ll have to create the practical freedoms of socially networked, effectively governed, and economically sufficient communities.

Taking out our fear on our neighbors won’t bring the old jobs or the old times back. But learning to know and work with our neighbors might make life livable and worth living.

On some level, that’s what we’re all looking for.

Just what each of us requires to feel OK enough varies from person to person, but more and more people are finding that the things that were supposed to make it all OK really don’t.

Job security, political stability, market volatility, and on and on — the boxes we’re supposed to check don’t seem to be adding up to the outcomes we expect.

Even if it’s 97 percent irrational or qualitative (the felt reality of ultra-low unemployment doesn’t seem quite as ecstatic as you might expect), the irrational parts of human nature have a powerful influence on human behavior.

And, collectively, the behavior of a society that generally feels too much less than OK may be quite unpleasant. (It may also appear unpredictable or inexplicable to pundits who do feel OK.)

Sooner or later — hopefully sooner — we’re going to have to have a bigger, more inclusive, more creative conversation about what it means to feel OK these days and how we’re going to make that feeling possible for more people.

Among the many lines that stuck with me from Too Big to Fail, one keeps lingering.

As I remember it, it’s something like this: You’re a really smart guy, but you’re running a totally messed-up system.

Smarts are flashy, but systems have a way of winning out over the long run. When you don’t know what you don’t know, you’ve probably got a design problem more than a raw IQ problem.

Are your systems as smart as they need to be? Are they outsmarting you?

In one of his ditties, Brian Doyle writes of a man who listened to him once when he needed to feel heard, and marvels at “the way an ear can be an oar” to someone in that situation.

Today’s the birthday of a dear friend who has provided me ears, oars, and instructions in rowing for the past 15 years.

And so today is a good day to celebrate the oars others have lent us, and to contemplate the oars we’ve lent to those in need.

It might also be a good day to wonder if there’s someone within earshot who might want to row with you a while, if only you’ll lend an ear.