Slow Down

There's an urgency to having a high school freshman. Once you realize you only have four more years, four more Christmasses, four more spring breaks, and four more summers ... the countdown begins ticking in your heart. Four is such a small number compared to the fourteen you've already shared. And those fourteen have been a blur. I'm not telling you anything you don't know. But the urgency has me a bit panicked.

Having a teenager is not having a lot of time. Teenagers don't give you much. All the time you get with them is wedged into their schedules, mostly against their will. Now that I'm unemployed, I'm acting as chauffeur to the teenager. This allows me more of those moments, wedged in between school, hockey practice and anyplace else he needs to go. Moments I wouldn't have if I were working. When I'm working full-time, in an office, I pay someone else to spend these moments with my son. Which is kind of strange, if you think about it, because I would rather be carting him around, getting little snippets of conversations with him than sitting in a gray office staring at a computer screen, waiting for someone to demand something of me, something that doesn't mean anything, and something I won't remember a year from now.

It's a strange world we live in.

We rush through our lives to support ourselves and keep a roof over our heads. We miss so many moments with our kids while we have them, and then we'll miss them when we're gone. We don't even have time for ourselves, let alone our children. Every time I'm unemployed, I'm struck by how much silence there is. I'm surprised by the luxury of getting lost in my thoughts. I'm surprised by the urge to write something that isn't for anybody else. It's almost like I have time to dream and to love ... time to wonder and to rest. No wonder we're all so on edge. Popping Xanax and taking antidepressants and drinking wine. It takes so much self-medicating to live in the modern world.

What if we took long walks every day, felt the sun on our faces, and breathed in deep the morning air? What if we could discuss philosophy and what happens after death with our fourteen-year-olds on our ride to the ice rink? What if we could feel a cat purring on our laps at noon, the both of us warming in a streak of sunlight coming in through the window?

What kind of world would that be?

It'd be nice if we could all work from home, or work part-time, or work not at all. I'm going to spend the majority of my life sitting in an office in front of a computer screen, writing ads for other people. Meanwhile, my children are growing up and out of the house. They'll be gone and I'll miss them. I suppose I'll be able to afford to send them to college and to keep a roof over their heads. And that's good and necessary, yes.

But what a strange world it is.

I wish we could all just slow down just a touch. Being able to drive our kids to practice doesn't seem like too much to ask. Or having an afternoon with a cat on our lap. Just a little space to breathe. Just a few moments to connect. These adjustments seem so small but would change the world.

I hope the world will change in time for my children.

Maybe they'll come of age in a world where working remotely is the norm. Maybe they'll have so many more moments than we did. I hope so. The younger generations seem so much smarter than the older ones. They watch us and they see how we live and they don't want that. So they change everything. I'm hoping they learned to slow down from watching us wasting our lives at breakneck speed.

Note: I wrote this when my son was a high school freshman, in 2018, before the pandemic hit.