A couple of years back, I clipped a stranger with my bag once. An accident — I lifted it, it swung wider than I’d judged, and it caught the woman behind me, out of my blindspot. It’s my fault, and I should have checked before lifting my bag (though allow me to add also…not sure why she’s that close but lol, let’s assume it’s me entirely). I apologized to her, and then once she said it’s okay, I moved on. I remember its very specific, it’s in Orchard Road in Singapore, and I was walking to MRT.
Just moments later, someone clipped me with a bag, and said sorry. In the moment I just said “it’s okay” and went on my way. And I meant it — really okay.
But only later (haha, my brain was slow?), I recalled that out of the corner of my eye I saw an angry face – I only pieced together afterwards: the lady had walked a loop around, came back toward me, lined herself up, and timed her own bag so it swung into me. As she passed she said “sorry” — the word. Then she walked off.
Only when I tried to recall more, then I remembered thinking, ah so it’s that lady.
What happened to me wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t a reflex. It was revenge. Aimed. Timed. By then my own half of it was long filed and gone — accident, apologised, done — which is the first thing worth noticing. I’d dropped it before I’d walked ten steps. She’d carried it around in a circle.
I’ve thought about that gap ever since — not because the bump mattered, but because of what her half of it reveals. It’s the single most expensive error people make, and almost nobody sees themselves making it.
I’ve had loads of similar experiences since, receiving it as well as catching myself doing it too mid-thought, mid-sentence and mid-action, because I wanted them to experience it too. I get it.
The fusion that makes the fight
She didn’t seem to have responded to what happened.
She responded to what she decided it meant. A bag caught her — impact — and somewhere in the half-second after, that became he PURPOSELY did that to me — intent. Once those two fused, retaliation wasn’t just reasonable to her, it was deserved.
Here’s the principle, and it’s worth saying flat: impact is not intent. What lands on you and what was aimed at you are two different facts, and the gap between them is where almost all conflict is manufactured. Not by the impact. By the story you staple to it.
Most people never separate the two. They feel the impact, infer the intent, and respond to the inference as if it were the event. They’re not fighting what happened. They’re fighting what they assumed.
Once you can see that gap, you start seeing it everywhere — and you can build for it.
As a father
This is the one I want my children to own before they leave my house…because I understand, I grew up where this was a constant problem where it misunderstandings weren’t thought – they were assumed to be intentional and the “perpetrator” needs to be attacked, for whatever reason of dysregulation or whatnot.
It can be a sibling knocks over the tower. The four-year-old’s whole body reads it as an attack and the retaliation is instant. But the older one didn’t aim at the tower — he was reaching past it. Impact: tower down. Intent: none. The fight that follows isn’t about the tower. It’s about the intent the younger one invented.
So the thing I’m actually teaching isn’t “don’t hit your brother.” It’s the prior skill: before you react, separate what happened from what you think he meant. A child who learns that early has a tool most adults never get.
As a husband
Marriage runs on this gap more than anywhere.
The tone that came out wrong after a long day. The thing that didn’t get done. The reply that was shorter than expected. Each one is an impact. And the fastest way to turn a non-event into a fight is to fuse it instantly with an intent — she doesn’t respect my time, he wasn’t listening — and then argue with the intent you assigned rather than the thing that actually happened.
The build here is a discipline, not a feeling: assume the most accidental explanation that still fits the facts, and ask before you assign. Most of the time the bag swing was a bag swing.
Nobody aimed.
As an operator
In a business, the intent-fusion error is a tax on the whole organisation.
A staff member makes a genuine mistake; a manager reads laziness or defiance into it and responds to that — and now you’ve got a motivated person learning that honest errors get treated as betrayals, so the next mistake gets hidden instead of surfaced. A patient’s complaint gets heard as an attack on the clinic rather than data about a gap. A partner’s hard email gets read as hostility rather than pressure.
The operator who separates impact from intent runs a cheaper, faster organisation. Mistakes surface early because people aren’t punished for the intent you imagined. You spend your energy on the actual problem instead of the motive you assigned to it. That’s not soft — it’s efficient. Which is the real version of the thing I first noticed watching that woman walk off: retaliation has negative ROI. She spent energy to change nothing. The bump had already happened; the swing fixed none of it.
Most conflict spending is exactly that — energy poured into settling a score that buys you nothing.
That’s why when people make mistakes, for me, I “target” the process and training, unless after 3-5 similar incidents, really no recourse, then other changes need to happen. This can apply to small relationships to even firmer relationships such as familial, business. It’s very different when one mistake is lack of knowledge/training, and it’s another thing entirely when its a decision and character (it’s repetitive).
Acknowledge the feeling. Decline the verdict.
There’s a finer move underneath all of this — the one I’m quietly proudest of in that small moment, not because it was hard, but because it’s the one most people skip.
When I said “it’s okay,” I wasn’t pretending nothing had happened, and I wasn’t conceding I’d wronged her – in fact, I didnt even piece two and two together lol. I was just moving…
But after realizing what happened (when I realized she had decided to circle back, walk towards me and aimed+timed her bag to hit me), I decided to do two separate things at once: acknowledging that her feeling was real to her, and declining the verdict attached to it. She was likely genuinely upset — that’s a fact about her, and I don’t need to argue with it.
But her being upset doesn’t make her version true, and acknowledging the feeling doesn’t obligate me to carry it, defend myself, or swing back or start a fight. She has her own life, maybe its a bad day or maybe it’s her…
That’s where most people lose.
They collapse “your feeling is real” into “you’re right” — and then they either capitulate, absorbing a guilt that was never theirs, or they counterattack, refusing the feeling itself just to fend off the verdict riding on it. You can do neither. You can let the feeling be real and let the verdict be false, at the same time.
So I noted it and went on with my day. It first stung, then I got little annoyed, but after processing it, I let go of it. But getting hit by someone upset over an accident is not a thing that earns real estate in my head — and mulling it would only have been me carrying the bag she’d handed me. I acknowledged her.
I just declined the delivery.
The discipline, plainly
You can’t control the impacts that land on you. People will bump you — accidentally and, sometimes, on purpose. What you control is the half-second after: whether you fuse the impact to an invented intent and swing back, or hold them apart long enough to respond to what actually happened.
Three things make it practical:
- Assume accident until you have evidence of intent. Most bumps are incidental bumps. The cost of wrongly assuming malice is far higher than the cost of wrongly assuming accident.
- Respond to impact, not to story. “That landed badly” is a real thing to address. “You did that to hurt me” is usually fiction, and you can’t fix fiction.
- Refuse to complete the cycle. The retaliation only continues if someone returns the swing. The person who declines to swing back is the one who ends it — and that’s strength, not weakness. [LINK: pre-committed rules / JADE post if/when written]
The real reason I let it go
I used to think letting small things go was a discipline — something I did. Looking closer, it isn’t. It’s structural.
When your attention is genuinely occupied by things that matter — work you’re building, people you’re responsible for, a direction you’ve actually committed to — and when your sense of who you are isn’t up for grabs in a stranger’s opinion of you, a small provocation can’t find a vacancy to fill. It’s not that I was strong enough to resist it. There was no room for it to land. Her retaliatory bag swing was revenge for her, and it can easily fill my heart to start a fight and hit back or scream at her.
But lol, I wasn’t available – that wasn’t even remotely on my mind.
But that cuts the other way too, and I have to be honest about it. It’s tempting to look at someone who does get hijacked by a small thing and decide they must be empty, or dysregulated, or lesser. That is the exact error this whole post is about — fusing an outcome to a verdict about a person — just aimed at their character instead of their motive. I can’t read a stranger’s life from one swing. Maybe it’s a bad season. Maybe something I’ll never know about got displaced onto me. The honest version isn’t a diagnosis of them; it’s a question for myself: what am I so organised around that this couldn’t touch it — and where, in the parts of my life I haven’t organised well, do small things still get to me? Because they do. Find the place a small thing still hijacks you, and you’ve found a place you haven’t built enough weight into yet.
The woman with the bag is in all of us. The skill isn’t never getting bumped. It’s catching the moment you’ve quietly decided an accident was an attack — and putting the bag down before you’ve turned around.
Such things happen to the even the best of us – these, we can call bad days.
But if every day, something “can spoil your entire day” or “you have to retaliate”…then it begets something to think about, isnt it?