“What is it like being a father?”
“What is it like being a father?”
James, a friend and father of two, asked me that question over dinner. Ivana had just turned 6 months, but the daze of childbirth hadn’t worn off yet.
“It’s as if your heart is beating outside your chest,” I responded mindlessly, “But you can’t really do anything about it.”
“That’s the most Tobi-like response ever, but I know what you mean.” He laughed.
I can’t get into the specifics of what my response means. That’s a topic for another letter.
But there is something to be said about how much we are impacted by the people, places and things that we hold so close to our hearts.
It could be your mother, boyfriend, daughter, hometown, career, or religion; if an entity means so much to you, you’d drop everything and attend to it on a whim.
Your time — and how you spend it — would be influenced by the people, places and things you love.
That’s a normal human response. In an ideal world.
In an ideal world, we would spend more time with the people we love.
In an ideal world, we would spend more time in the places we love.
In an ideal world, we would spend more time doing the things we love.
But that’s not how most people spend their time. In the real world.
In the real world, we spend our time working and living with people we tolerate.
In the real world, we spend our time in places that have transactional value.
In the real world, we spend our time doing things we’ve convinced ourselves to do.
In the real world, we aren’t intentional with our time.
Slowly, over time, we start feeling like we are losing time. We look back and wonder, what the hell did we do with our time?
And that thought alone makes us feel tired, listless, and frustrated.
But we don’t change, and nothing changes. In the real world.
In the past few months, I considered how I spent my time and realized that so much time was spent on people, in places and doing things that weren’t close to my heart.
I was tolerating people, making transactions every chance I got and convincing myself that I had to do things simply because I had to do them.
But since that realization, my view of time has changed.
I no longer see time as something that I have to give.
I see time as a gift that I have been given.
And that gift will be taken away from me one day.
I remember speaking to my friend, AJ, after we had just watched England lose to Italy in the UEFA EURO 2020 final.
It was a disappointing loss, so we were talking the loss away.
But somehow, the concept of loss crept back into the conversation when I said, “Fatherhood makes me think about my own mortality.”
I said this about 5 months before Ivana was even born. But I had read enough books about childbirth and early childhood years to know that from the moment your child is born, you’re everything to that child. They can’t afford to lose you at any time.
Plus, I had lived experience of losing a parent. So, I couldn’t help but consider my own mortality at that moment.
Mortality gets a bad rap.
We tend to think of our mortality as a limiting quality — a weakness that scares us, and maybe, rightly so. But mortality is a good reminder that we won’t always have time.
It’s a reminder that the time we have now is a temporary gift, and although we can do whatever we want with that gift, of what good is any gift if we don’t spend it how we’d love to?
Since my view of time has changed, I have increased the number of times I say no.
I say no more often. I say no every day. I am saying no right now to someone and something else by writing to you.
Conventional wisdom says we should always keep an open mind. While I absolutely agree with that advice, I don’t think it applies to my time.
My time has a closed-door policy, and everything that knocks on that door has to be properly evaluated before it walks in. If a person, event or activity doesn’t align with what I love or at least gets me closer to someone, someplace or something I love, it’s not going on my calendar.
I believe that’s how we ought to spend our time. I know we don’t live in an ideal world, and in the real world, this approach is easier said than done. But I also know there are incremental steps you can take today to create your own ideal world.
And if you’re not sure what those steps are, consider this: in the next 24 hours, there will be one person, place or thing that will demand your time, but you’d know that isn’t how you’d love to spend your time. When that happens, say no.
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