The other day, I passed by a bus shelter on Monroe Drive in midtown Atlanta where a woman was determinedly sweeping the sidewalk with a broom.

She seemed to be an unhoused person, judging by the large amount of stuff stacked on the bench within the shelter. This was her home, her turf, and she was defending it from the onslaught of grime and debris from the road.

Even though I’m in a more privileged position in life, I can relate to this woman’s desire to do the tidying that she could. I understand her instinct to maintain life’s little routines in the face of chaos.

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When I was a kid, my cousin's girlfriend taught me how to play solitaire at a family gathering.

That Christmas, I received a book of solitaire games and a whole world opened up. There wasn’t just one kind of solitaire—there were many! (That seven-pile game on every Windows computer is called Klondike).

For each game, the authors listed the chance of winning, the level of strategy involved (as opposed to pure chance), the time to play, and so on.

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I used to have a tendency to back off when I was winning.

Whether it was a board game or a bit of business success, some combination of guilt, laziness, or fatigue would lead me to coast a bit, leading to diminished results and even losses.

In order to curb this tendency, I took up tennis. I learned how to follow through on a swing and commit to a play. I practiced keeping up the intensity all the way to the end of a match, even when I was losing.

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Last fall, back when things were normal, I joined a singles tennis league.

I had started playing tennis only a couple of months before, but one of the reasons I started playing tennis in the first place was to develop my competitive side. My penchant for seeking win-win solutions had been causing me to back down in situations where it was arguably inappropriate to do so.

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Monopoly is an awful game.

It takes forever to get going and forever to end. It involves too much luck, even without “Free Parking” jackpots.

And once someone starts winning, their victory is irreversible and soon makes the game miserable for everyone, even the winner. It feels icky to be the greedy landlord, riding high on your ill-gotten gains, relentlessly collecting rents in some dystopian Atlantic City where you’ve already bled your tenants dry and sent your own siblings to jail.

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