For most of my twenties, I was busy. Not the kind of busy you perform at a party when someone asks how work is going. I mean I actually felt it, in my chest, all the time. My calendar was full. I was always a little behind. There were never enough hours, and I could have given you a detailed accounting of where every one of them went. If you had told me I had time to spare, I would have laughed at you and meant it.
Busy was the baseline I never thought to question. It was the thing that was always happening, the background condition I planned around. I took it for granted because it felt as real as the floor under me.
Then I had a kid.
Real constraint showed up, the kind that does not negotiate with you. Sleep went first. Then the open evenings, the slow mornings, the quiet pockets I did not even know I had been carrying around. A newborn does not care about your calendar. It does not wait for a good time. And in the middle of all that, something strange happened. The things that actually mattered to me still got done. Not everything. But the things I cared about most kept getting done, somehow, with a fraction of the time I used to swear I needed.
That broke something in my head. Because if I had less time than ever and the important things still happened, then what exactly had all that earlier busyness been about?
Around then I picked up a book I had read years before, Someday Is Today by Matthew Dicks. Dicks is a guy who wrote nine books in twelve years while teaching elementary school full time, running a wedding DJ business on the side, and raising a family. It moved me the first time too, but parts of it stayed theoretical, words about a life I could picture but had not felt. This time I had been to the place. His whole point is that he never found time for any of it. He stopped thinking about his day in hours and started thinking about it in minutes. And he stopped telling himself he would get to things someday.
That word stuck with me. Someday.
Looking back at all my busy years, I finally saw what had actually been going on. I was not out of time. I was a bad prioritizer. I had never learned how to cut ruthlessly, to look at ten things that all felt important and kill eight of them without flinching. And back then I could afford to be bad at it, which is what let me off the hook for so long. There was enough slack in my life that a mediocre prioritizer still got by. Everything felt like it mattered the same amount, and I tried to stay on top of all of it at once. That feeling is easy to mistake for being busy. It was really just the symptom. The real problem was that I had never been forced to choose.
I keep coming back to how “I am too busy” and “I will get to it someday” are the same sentence wearing different clothes. Both of them push the thing you care about into some softer future where there will magically be more room. But that future never comes, because it was never a time problem in the first place. It was a priority I had not been willing to name out loud.
What fatherhood did, more than anything, was kill someday. You cannot defer a child. There is no version of next quarter where you will have more bandwidth for them. They are here, now, and that forces a kind of decision most of life lets you avoid. Decide what matters now, or watch it slip. The minutes were always there. I just finally pointed them at something on purpose.
I want to be careful here, because the easy version of this story is the one where I was lying to myself the whole time and then woke up. I do not think that is true. I think I genuinely believed I was busy, and in a narrow sense I was. I just had not had a reason to look underneath it yet.
Most of us do not get that forcing function until life leans on us hard enough. An illness, a loss, something that strips away the slack and makes you see what you were really doing with it. Mine came early, and luckily it came in the form of a kid. Pleasantly chaotic, and with a habit of waking me before dawn.
I still feel busy some days. The difference is that now I mostly know when busy is real and when it is just the old reflex returning.