Four days in the last two weeks. I’ve spent hours inside the Versa, sunglasses on, air conditioning running, waiting for one participant who has zero regard for timing, schedules, rules, or even other people.

I have to keep telling myself that greatness isn’t built from magical, life-changing moments. It’s the small acts. Ones showing others kindness, honesty, and compassion. All done in the seemingly ordinary run of a day. I truly believe that. I’ve built an entire philosophy around that — show up. Pay attention. Get out of the way.

Now I see what showing up looks like: sitting outside Medicenter Pharmacy, not on my schedule, waiting on someone who was supposed to be there, all because Dana (not her real name) broke a rule, again. Or maybe the rules broke her — I’m not always sure which is which. Multiple stops. Various days. What I do is a small deed, driving someone to where she needed to be, kept running into the larger, harder fact that recovery follows a jagged, unhurried line. It’s never straight, and some days? It isn’t a line – it’s a circle, coming back to square one.

Does patience count as one of the small acts, one that’s supposed to add up to something? I don’t know. It didn’t feel like it. It felt more like showing up for someone who wasn’t showing up for herself.

When you do a job like mine, you become an eyewitness, not a counselor or an advocate. You are nothing more than the guy behind the wheel of a Gibson’s Nissan, the driver, watching someone’s choices play out in real time, from your front-row seat. You didn’t ask for it, and worse, you can’t leave.

There’s a version of this story where I wind up getting frustrated, letting it show. Some days I get really close, gritting my teeth just to make it through. When you’re at the third stop of the morning to a location not on the schedule, when the appointment gets missed because Dana chose her own rules over the program’s, the frustration is honest.

Small acts of kindness are supposed to feel good. But some of them just feel like patience with your jaw tight. You do them anyway — not because they’re guaranteed to add up to greatness, but because the alternative is worse: a version of me that stops showing up too.

But frustration isn’t the whole story either. Because underneath the missed pickups and the rearranged mornings is a harder question: what does showing up really mean when the other person isn’t ready to? I always thought ‘Show up. Pay attention. Get out of the way.’ was about me — about my posture toward the world. This week, it was tested, not by me, but by someone else, and her posture toward her own life.

I’d love to find a clear, clean answer here. I don’t have one. Instead I have a Nissan Versa with the AC running and a job that asks me to be emotionally steady even when the person I’m driving isn’t or, better yet, can’t be. That’s the small act. Not fixing her. Not even really helping her, some days — just refusing to let my own care shrink down to match her chaos. Staying decent. Staying on time. Being the one constant in a busy week.

Recovery, from the driver’s seat of the Versa, is messy. It looks like one woman who knows the rules, breaks them anyway, and a driver who shows up regardless. Because that’s the job. But it’s more than that. Because somebody has to keep being reliable.

So, I do what I do. I keep driving. I keep waiting outside pharmacies, homes, and wherever the research team sends me. I keep paying attention, even when what I’m paying attention to is someone else’s hard week bleeding into mine. And that’s when I step out of the way — not of Dana’s recovery, which was never mine to manage, but of my own need for this to look like the tidy story the quote promised.

Some days, showing up is the whole job. It rarely feels like greatness. I think that’s the point.