Tying myself in knots over a deadline I made up

A morning, a couple of knotted hairbands and a deadline nobody set. These days I ask one question first: what actually breaks if this slips?

Flat illustration of a bathroom counter in dark blue tones. An unused hairbrush lies beside a blue and a red hair elastic, each stretched into a long loop and tied to the other with a reef knot. Behind them stand a round white timer and a steaming mug of coffee.

Sometimes I need reminding to stay in the moment.

Some years back, my daughter was in her early school years. It was a random weekday morning, and we were getting ready to leave.

My mornings tend to be either very strict routines or no structure at all, and this was one of the mornings where I’d locked into a routine and a set plan, and I was pushing to stick to it. As usual, planning a few steps at a time, I sent my daughter to the bathroom to brush her hair while I fed the cats, poured the coffee, checked the traffic and whatever else I could fit into that timeframe.

A few minutes went by, still no daughter. I felt my schedule slipping, a schedule that had no hard edge anyway, because I had no morning meetings or anything like that. I think I was just set on leaving at exactly that time because that’s what I usually did. I started to feel a bit impatient.

Finally, she came out of the bathroom with distinctly unbrushed hair, handed me a couple of hairbands and said: “So, Dad, when I got to the bathroom, I completely forgot what I was supposed to be doing, so I started practising my knots instead. And now these hairbands are tied together and I can’t get them loose. Will you help me?”

… And just like that, all the impatience and fretting evaporated. We untied the knots together, left a few minutes later than planned, and absolutely nothing broke.

I’ve thought about that morning since, because we do the same thing at work. We say “we’ll have it done by Friday”, and somewhere along the way Friday turns into a hard edge nobody actually put there. No customer waiting, no release, no meeting. Just a date someone said out loud once, and now everyone’s pushing to hit it, a bit impatient and a bit short with each other.

So these days I try to ask one question before I start pushing: what actually breaks if this slips? Sometimes the answer is “quite a lot”, and then we push. Surprisingly often it’s “nothing, really”, and those few minutes are probably better spent untying a few knots together.

And if you’re lucky, you get a few moments to appreciate the world from a kid’s perspective, with all the possibilities and intricacies it holds.

Built from 8376381