You Don’t Get to Make
Those Moments Up
What I learned about time standing in the ocean with my kids, about a minute before my life changed.
We took a family trip to Disney World and then spent a few days at the beach. It was one of those trips you look forward to for months. It was the boys’ first time at Disney, their first time on the rides, meeting the characters, seeing all of it in person instead of on a screen.
We opened the park in the morning and stayed until the fireworks. Long days, a lot of walking, a lot of laughing. One night one of my boys was so tired he nearly fell asleep standing there, and he still did not want to leave. Watching them experience it was better than anything I could have planned for myself.
A few days in, my mom called. She had not seen my dad and did not think he had come home the night before.
It did not make sense. He was not someone who stayed out late or disappeared without a reason. I told her he had probably left early or was out running errands. Something did not feel right, but we were supposed to be having fun, so I pushed it aside.
The next morning we went to the ocean. It was the boys’ first time seeing it. Water going farther than you could see, which makes everything feel bigger somehow. We were in the water together, jumping waves, laughing, nothing rushed and nothing loud. Just being there.
Then my phone rang.
The second I heard my mom’s voice I knew. She told me my dad had been found in his car. He had driven over to check on his truck, something he did from time to time, and at some point he had a heart attack and passed away.
Everything inside me went silent.
I remember standing there while everything around me kept going. The waves kept coming in. People were still talking. My kids were still playing in the water a few feet away. But I was not there anymore. I had been pulled completely inside my own head.
Then the next thoughts started arriving all at once. How do I tell my wife. What do I say to my kids. Do I tell them now or do I wait. My wife’s birthday was the next day. We had plans. We were supposed to celebrate, not figure out how to get home early.
And underneath all of it was the one I could not get around.
I don’t get another chance. No more conversations. No more time. No chance to call him, hear his voice, ask his advice, or tell him what he meant to me.
It is strange how fast your mind starts replaying ordinary moments once you find out there will not be another one.
Who he was
He was my best friend. He was there through everything. He helped raise my kids so we did not have to rely on daycare. He showed up every single time, without hesitation, without being asked.
I can still hear him. Just keep going. You’ll figure it out.
He used to tell me something else all the time. The world is made up of all kinds of people, so always be kind to everyone. Then he would usually grin and add that besides, I was small and did not need to get beaten up.
That was my dad. Equal parts wisdom and smart-ass humor.
The lesson stuck with me not because it was complicated but because he lived it. He treated people well regardless of their title or background or what they could do for him. The older I get, the more I understand he was never really teaching me how to avoid getting beaten up. He was teaching me how to treat people.
I never got to tell him how much that meant.
Later has a way of
arriving faster than
we expect.
What that did to how I see time
Time does not wait for you to be ready. It does not slow down because your season is busy. It keeps moving whether you are paying attention or not, and most of us live like we have considerably more of it than we do.
People wait to say things. They wait to spend real time with the people they love. They wait to take care of their health, or start the thing they have been circling, or become the person they already know they are capable of being.
The trouble with later is that it shows up faster than anybody plans for.
And here is the part I did not expect to learn. Most of life is not made of milestone moments. It is made of ordinary days that feel unremarkable while you are inside them and turn out to be the whole thing once they are gone. Nobody at the end of their life is thinking about a title or a bank balance. They would trade all of it for one more regular afternoon.
Being present and being available are not the same thing
This is where I have to be honest about my own record, because I did not walk away from that beach a fixed person.
There were whole seasons where work followed me everywhere. I would be sitting at one of my kids’ games, physically in the stands, and mentally somewhere else entirely. Turning over a problem. Drafting an email in my head. Thinking about a meeting the next morning. If you had asked me where I was, I would have told you I was with my family. Part of me was still at the office.
Nothing dramatic ever happened in those moments, and that is exactly what makes them so easy to justify. You are there. You showed up. You did not miss anything.
Except you did.
For a long time I assumed that was a discipline problem, that I just needed to try harder to focus. It turns out there is a real mechanism underneath it.
Sophie Leroy, an organizational behavior researcher at the University of Washington, identified something she named attention residue. When you switch from one thing to another, part of your attention stays behind on the first one instead of moving with you. The effect is strongest when the first thing was left unfinished, was time-pressured, or was emotionally charged, which describes most of what people carry home from work. It is not a willpower failure. Your attention simply does not transfer cleanly, and the residue keeps drawing on the same limited resource you are trying to give to whatever is in front of you now. More from Sophie Leroy.
Read that again if you have ever felt like you were failing at being present despite genuinely trying. You are not weak. You are running a background process, and it is eating the attention you meant to spend on your kid.
Which also means the fix is not trying harder in the moment. It is closing the loop before you walk in the door. Finish the thought, write down where you left it, decide when you are picking it back up. Unfinished is what makes it follow you.
You do not always know it is the last one
There is a second version of this that took me longer to see.
My oldest son played baseball for years. Then there was a last game. Then a final basketball game, and a final cross-country meet, and before I really registered any of it I was watching him walk across a graduation stage and getting ready to send him to college.
That is when it became real. The games that had felt endless were over. The events that were always on the calendar just were not anymore. There would not be another season to watch him play or another race to stand at the finish of.
You do not always know it is the last one while you are in it. That is what makes it land later.
My wife has always been better at this than I am. There were times work made me late to a game or made me miss one altogether, and she would remind me that these are the moments they will actually remember. Not the meetings, not the emails, whether we were there. Our boys have never had to wonder whether she will be in the stands. They know.
The older I get, the more I think that is the kind of impact that matters most.
The meeting gets replaced. The project gets finished. The email gets answered eventually. The moments you miss with the people you love do not come back around.
What to actually do about it
I am not going to tell you to quit your job or stop being ambitious. I have not done either of those things. The point is not to care less about your work. It is to stop letting the assumption of more time make your decisions for you.
Close the loop and answer three questions
- Finish the thought before you walk in. Two minutes in the driveway. Write down where you stopped and when you are picking it up. Unfinished work is what follows you inside, so give it a place to sit until tomorrow.
- Ask what you are protecting. Not what you intend to protect. What actually gets defended when the calendar fills up. If nothing is protected, everything is negotiable, and the people who love you are usually the easiest thing to reschedule.
- Ask what you are prioritizing. Your schedule tells the truth about this better than your intentions do. Look at last week honestly and see whether it matches what you say matters.
- Ask where you are truly present. Not where your body was. Where your attention actually was. That difference is the whole thing, and it is the one nobody else can see.
Sometimes not waiting looks completely ordinary. It is making the call instead of assuming there will be time later. It is putting the phone in another room for an hour. It is saying the thing to the person while they are still here to hear it.
What I would tell you
I have thought a lot about what I would have said to my dad if I had known that trip was the last chance. It is not complicated. I would have told him what those small lessons did to the way I raise my own kids. I would have told him that being kind to everybody turned out to be the most useful thing anyone ever taught me. I would have told him he was my best friend.
None of that required a special occasion. I could have said it on any regular Tuesday for twenty years.
That is the part I want you to take from this. You are not going to get a warning. There is no notification that says this is the last ordinary afternoon. What you have is right now, and whoever is in the next room, and the phone in your pocket with their number in it.
Your family does not need what is left of you at the end of the day. They need the best of you while you are there.
You will not get a warning that something is the last time. Most of life is ordinary days that only look important later. Being in the room is not the same as being present, and unfinished work is what follows you home, so close the loop before you walk in. Then ask what you are protecting, what you are prioritizing, and where your attention actually is.
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