Walking Slowly

About the time I had embraced that culture of self-important busyness, two monumental things were happening outside of my work rhythm. Our eldest son was entering preschool and my wife was working her way into a doctoral program. She needed certain undistracted hours of the day to work on her assignments and do research, and our then-toddler needed a place to go during those precious few hours. Much to my initial selfish dismay, I would need to interrupt my precious work rhythm to help support those two efforts. Initially, having my wife manage the preschool schedule seemed like just the solution we needed. She would drop our son off on the way to the university, work a few hours, and then pick him up on her way home. But after a few weeks of that, she began feel the pain of not having enough time to get all her school work done. Drop-off and pick-up and her time in the car were carmping her available hours of productivity. So, wisely, she asked that she could drop our eldest off to me at work a half an hour before his preschool started, and then I would walk him across my school’s parking lot to the church where his preschool was housed. My workplace was perfectly on the way to her university, so it was just a matter of pulling in, dropping him at the door, and then getting back on the road toward downtown. For me, it was a simple matter of a thirty-minute, two-day-per-week interruption to my morning work routine. It was a no-brainer. Tantrums and Delight I wish I could tell you that I received that request well. In reality, I kind of threw an adult-level fit, spewing self-important excuses about how my morning were full of meetings and phone calls and Scripture reading. My WTA commitment had taken root to the point of affecting my attentiveness to my family. I needed to be ready for whatever might come my way in any given morning, and if I was not around for it, then I was letting down my teammates. There were all kinds of excuses I had in my back pocket to protect my administrator realm, and I am pretty sure I laid them all out for my wife to weed through. But her very valid needs cut through my noise. After a brief tantrum, I reluctantly agreed to her petition. While I was glad to see my son for a little bit longer those mornings, I was still pretty focused on trying to get back to work the whole time he was there. When it was time to drop him off at preschool, I would hurry his little toddler legs across the parking lot so that I could hurry my dad legs back to my building and get back to work. But with each step across those 100 or so yards from door to door, I began to feel the nasty weight of my commitment to what was perpetual but not eternal. I was so blinded by the importance of my role as the leader of an organization that I was complaining about the preciousness of getting invited into the wonder of my child’s life. Wonder Restored Graciously, the harsh pull of my roll as a school administrator began to dissolve at the soft touch of my son’s chubby hand, which guided me to the ripples of puddles, the woosh of the wind, the crunch of fallen leaves, the shimmering meticulousness of spider webs, and the angular dance of the morning fall sunrays. An otherwise two-minute walk began to take a long 10 minutes, which slowly began to feel like it was never long enough. Wonder had crept back into my heart, and I became careful to not smoosh it out of my son. In what seemed like three minutes, those couple years of pre-school came to their speedy conclusion. What I had complained against out of my misplaced self-importance had become my great treasure. Over and over, I wanted to rewind to those precious moments and make a joyful habit of noticing and delighting inthe beauty around every corner. Thankfully, I had at least learned to walk slowly across the two parking lots, listening and looking for wherever my eldest son’s wonder directed. And I began to wonder, too. Mistakes Into Gifts A few years after our eldest was well into grade school, I had the pleasure of sharing my hard lesson with one of our faculty members. I was sitting beside him when he got a text from his wife asking him to interrupt his lunch break to walk across the parking lot to pick up his kids at the same pre-school my son had attended. When he got the text, he was pretty upset about the ask. His intense days of discussions, presentations, and lengthy papers in a humanities classroom did not leave him much extra headspace during the day. On the one hand, helping his wife out in whatever situation and being with his kids should have been an easy and automatic yes. But like so many of us who have passionately poured ourselves into our craft, he barely had a couple of drops of himself available during a tightly scheduled work day. Recognizing my own journey in his, I simply said, “Hey, man, walk slowly. You won't get this time back, and it's more precious than the annoying inconvenience might make it seem.” Amazingly, that teacher looked at me and seemed to re-center himself, smiled, and went out to be with his kids while his wife made her way to meet him and pick them up. He reported later that it was a beautiful time and that he was really glad to have been interrupted in that way. He also took a few minutes out of class time to tell his students about the conversation, partly in hopes that they too could learn to walk slowly through life whenever those inevitably came their way.