The Hour I Didn’t Plan For

“Twelve is one, two, right?”

My almost-five-year-old asked that from the black dry-erase board at The Nexus on Tuesday, marker in hand, with the most serious little thinking face you’ve ever seen. The two people still at the table with me stopped mid-conversation to tell him yes.

He wasn’t supposed to be there. For most of that morning, neither was I.

Roundtable Tuesdays is a standing hour at The Nexus where people in our community talk honestly about what’s making noise for them, in work and in life. I spent most of this one at a pharmacy counter, waiting well over an hour for a prescription. I answered emails on my phone and tried to keep a preschooler entertained somewhere between the snack aisle and the toy aisle. I was stewing, and I won’t pretend otherwise.

Somewhere in that line, though, I said the thing I’ve been saying to myself for years: I’m lucky to have this freedom.

By the time we walked into The Nexus, there were about ten minutes left. I sat down, and he immediately needed the bathroom.

Most business owners I know started their companies for some version of that freedom. They wanted to be the one who picks up the sick kid, or to stop asking permission to live their own life. On a hard week, though, a lot of us quietly start treating that freedom like a debt. The flexible schedule becomes the reason we’re behind. The morning we showed up for our family becomes the night we spend “making up” for lost time. Tuesday night, for the record, was one of those nights.

The freedom itself doesn’t change from week to week. The story you tell yourself about it does.

The lesson I caught in those last ten minutes of Roundtable was about “fake it till you make it”: act for the situation you’re in, not for how you feel in the moment. I laughed a little, because I’m living proof. I’ve told myself I’m lucky so many times that I don’t really have to say it anymore. It started as a choice I made on bad days, and over time it became the way I see things.

That isn’t positive thinking for its own sake. It’s a business skill. How you frame your freedom and your success decides whether you protect them or resent them, and owners who resent what they’ve built tend to give it away one “just this once” at a time.

There are three ways to keep that from happening.

The first way is to name it out loud, especially on the days it costs you something. “I have to wait at the pharmacy” and “I get to be the one at the pharmacy” describe the same hour, but only one of them leaves you with energy afterward. Say the second one until you believe it.

The second way is to count the cost honestly and plan for it. Freedom isn’t free. For me it shows up as late nights catching up on what the day didn’t allow. That’s a fair trade, but only if you build in margin ahead of time, so you aren’t paying for it in resentment after the fact.

The third way is to surround yourself with people who make room for your actual life. That’s what happened at The Nexus on Tuesday. While my son was at the board, my wife called, and he proudly told her what he was working on. She mentioned his letter of the week was W, so one of our members started asking him for W words. He turned to the board and wrote “wood,” all by himself, and we reacted like he’d just closed a deal.

So here’s my challenge for you this week. At that same Roundtable, one of our members was helping someone work through a writer’s rut, and his advice was to flip the scene: take the emotional state a scene ends in, turn it, and let that new state become where the next scene begins. It works for writers, and it works at a pharmacy counter on a Tuesday morning. The next time you’re stuck in a line you didn’t plan for, catch the story you’re telling yourself and flip the scene. Then look around and ask whether the people in your life make room for you when real life walks in the door with you. If they don’t, go find a room that does. Roundtable Tuesdays are a good place to start.

I missed most of a meeting I’d been looking forward to this week. But I didn’t miss my son writing “wood” on a whiteboard, a word I didn’t know he could spell and definitely not the W word I’d have guessed, while the people around that table cheered him on.

When you call your freedom what it is, it stops feeling like the thing that puts you behind and starts feeling like the reason you built all this in the first place.