My neighbor let her dog use my lawn as a toilet every morning for six months and never cleaned up once — I stayed polite until she made one comment I couldn’t forget, and by the next morning I’d taught her a lesson without raising my voice once.

lawn.

And nearly every morning afterward, I went outside and cleaned up what Marguerite left behind.

Five minutes of work.

That was all.

But the real cost was not the five minutes.

The real cost was what it slowly did to the way I viewed her.

Every time I cleaned up after Winston, I spent a little more of the generosity I had originally extended to Marguerite.

A little more patience.

A little more goodwill.

A little more belief that she simply didn’t understand what she was doing.

Eventually, that