It's 9:47 p.m. when you finally sit down.
Not I'm going to relax now sit down.
More like your legs have officially resigned and the chair happened to be nearby.
You exhale.
Ohhhhh.
There it is.
Your body has apparently been requesting this for hours.
And for approximately seven seconds, you are doing absolutely nothing.
Then your brain clocks back in.
The laundry is still in the dryer. Definitely wrinkled. There's that text you meant to return and the permission slip that needs to go back tomorrow.
Wait.
Did you sign the permission slip?
Nope.
Fantastic.
And now, without moving an inch, you're somehow back at work.
That's the part I've been thinking about lately, because I can be physically sitting in a chair while mentally running through tomorrow, revisiting today and assigning myself tasks for a version of the evening that absolutely does not have enough hours left in it.
Technically resting.
Very restful.
I think a lot of us are waiting for the moment when life finally gives us permission to stop doing that.
When this season settles down. When work isn't so demanding. When the kids don't need quite so much. When the financial thing gets resolved. When we finish the project, make the decision, get through the hard thing or finally catch up on whatever we've apparently been behind on since 2017.
Then we'll breathe. We'll be more present. We'll enjoy things more. Maybe our brains will even close a few of the forty-seven tabs they apparently need open at all times.
And I get it.
Some seasons really are harder than others. There are circumstances that genuinely need to change. Peace doesn't require pretending something difficult isn't difficult.
But I've started wondering about the finish line we keep moving.
Because there have been plenty of things in my life that I was absolutely certain I just needed to get through.
And then I got through them.
You know what happened?
Life handed me another thing.
So considerate.
The kids entered a different stage. Work changed. A new decision appeared. Something broke. Somebody needed something. A problem I couldn't possibly have anticipated wandered onto the calendar.
And suddenly the peaceful future I'd been working toward was once again scheduled for a later date.
That's a terrible arrangement when you think about it.
Because if peace requires everything around me to settle down first, I'm handing an awful lot of authority over my life to circumstances that have never demonstrated any interest in cooperating.
And after an entire month of talking about control, I think this might be one of the quieter ways it shows up.
We don't necessarily try to control everything. We just keep telling ourselves we'll be okay once everything is under control.
That's different enough to hide in plain sight.
You can call it responsibility. Being productive. Getting through a busy season. Handling what needs to be handled. And sometimes that's exactly what it is.
But sometimes we're so busy managing life that we forget to actually be in it.
I've done this on vacations, which feels particularly offensive.
You spend all this time planning something because you want your family to enjoy it. Then you get there and you're checking the time, thinking about the next reservation, making sure everybody has what they need, wondering whether we're staying here too long because there was that other thing we wanted to do...
Meanwhile, everyone else is apparently just... on vacation.
Imagine.
And it isn't only vacations. You're at Christmas thinking about whether the food is ready and when everyone needs to leave. You're at your kid's game mentally arranging what has to happen afterward. You're having dinner with friends and part of your brain is already thinking about tomorrow morning. You're sitting in the chair at 9:47 p.m., but instead of experiencing two quiet minutes, you're using them to conduct a performance review of your day.
And that's when it hits me:
You can't fully enjoy something while you're also managing it.
At least not in the same way.
Part of you is always standing outside the experience, evaluating how it's going. Did we do enough? Is everyone happy? Am I behind? What happens next? What am I forgetting?
And the moments we're supposedly working so hard to protect keep happening while we're somewhere else mentally.
That's the cost I care about most. It's the conversation you half-heard because your brain was somewhere else, the funny thing your kid said while you were checking the clock, or the ten minutes of quiet you didn't enjoy because you spent them thinking about everything you should've been doing instead.
And then there's the candle still sitting in the wrapper because apparently we were waiting for a more appropriate occasion to relax.
Light the freaking candle.
This is the occasion.
Your life is happening.
I think that's why Paul's words in Philippians 4 land differently for me now. He says he learned to be content in whatever circumstances he was in.
What catches me in that verse is the word learned. Contentment wasn't something that automatically arrived when Paul's circumstances improved—and his circumstances weren't exactly cooperating. He learned how to experience something steady inside them.
That's different from the way I sometimes approach peace. I tend to think of it as the reward waiting at the bottom of the to-do list. Paul makes it sound more like a way of being that can exist while there's still stuff on the list.
I like that.
I also find it slightly inconvenient.
Because now I can't keep telling myself that the reason I'm not present is entirely because life hasn't settled down yet.
Some of this is practice.
Can I sit here for two minutes without turning the quiet into planning time? Can I have dinner without mentally moving into tomorrow? Can I enjoy something without evaluating whether we're enjoying it correctly? Can I let a good moment be good without immediately thinking about what happens after it?
That's what I want to practice.
Not becoming some permanently serene woman who floats through the house while everyone else looks for the permission slip.
She sounds lovely.
I don't know her.
I'm talking about something much smaller: a moment where I'm actually where my feet are. Where nothing has been solved, but I'm not solving it either. Where I notice that right here, in the middle of a life that is unfinished and occasionally ridiculous, I'm okay.
That feels like a much more believable version of peace to me.
And I think that's what we've been moving toward through this whole conversation about control. Not a life where nothing goes wrong or a version of you who no longer cares about plans, outcomes or whether somebody remembered to move the laundry.
Just a life where you don't have to hold everything so tightly before you're allowed to enjoy any of it.
So tonight, if you finally make it to the chair at 9:47 and your brain immediately starts conducting inventory, notice it. The laundry can still be wrinkled in two minutes. The text can stay unanswered. Tomorrow can wait until tomorrow for just a second.
Sit there.
Light the candle.
And let this life—the unfinished one—be the one you get to live.
Want to keep going with this conversation?
🎧 Ep 62: Loosening Your Grip and Learning Contentment When Life Feels Out of Control →