A Weekly Pause to Move You Forward
Friday night. Eight men sitting under two heat lamps, eating soup of all things, talking about roses, buds, and thorns.
One of the guys had organized it. A men's night. The kind where you actually talk about what's going on instead of just watching the game. (Though we did take a brief detour into Murder Mountain and Humboldt County before getting back on track.)
The homework: scroll through your camera roll from the year. Come ready to share a rose, a bud, and a thorn.
I'd done it quickly on the way over. Just flew in from Seattle after a long week. Scrolled back a few months, picked some highlights, thought I had what I needed.
As we went around the table, themes started to emerge.
Financial pressures. The tension between making time for aging parents and making time for kids. Grief and loss, and trying to process something so abstract while keeping life moving forward.
Pushing hard in your work to provide for your family, but that same push stealing the time you get to spend with them. Handling everything well on paper, but ending the day depleted.
The guys were generous with their stories. Honest in ways that don't happen at most tables. I'm grateful they welcomed me to that.
The roses, buds, and thorns kept bleeding into each other.
One theme kept surfacing for me: time.
How we spend it. How fast it goes. How there never seems to be enough of it, no matter how intentional we try to be.
I drove home thinking about how everyone at that table was living full lives.
Building things that mattered. And still wishing there was more time for all of it.
You might not have eight buddies under heat lamps. But you likely still know this feeling.
Saturday morning, I went back through my camera roll. Really went through it this time.
Family dinners with everyone squeezed around the table. Beaches. Baseball games. Mountains. Friends visiting from out of town. Hiking trails. Birthday celebrations. Quiet moments that didn't feel quiet at the time. Work wins that mattered. Conversations that shifted something.
But also: Photos from airports and hotel rooms. The LA fires threatening everything. Medical visits and me in crutches. Some hard moments that were also formative to the year and required time, energy and effort.
I kept scrolling.
There was so much. We'd done so much. And I'd forgotten most of it.
Where did the year go?
It's December 13th. You're looking at the calendar. Maybe you’re thinking, The days are so full. Where does the time go?
You had plans. Things you wanted to start. People you meant to call. Books you were going to read. Projects that mattered.
And now here we are.
Nearly 80% of professionals report feeling rushed all the time. Two-fifths of parents say that most days, they're so stressed they cannot function.
Time scarcity is everywhere. And every article about it tells you the same thing: Cut the noise. Prioritize. Be more efficient. Stop wasting time.
But what if they're solving for the wrong problem?
Sometimes scarcity is from waste - scrolling when you meant to create, saying yes to things that don't align, running on autopilot through days that blur for the wrong reasons.
Some is from survival - you're in the grind because the bills don't wait. And sometimes what looks like waste is actually serving a purpose; rest, exploration, the randomness that leads somewhere you couldn't have planned.
But I think there's a third cause of time scarcity.