This morning I was half-asleep at the table, putting a slice of the last summers tomato in my mouth. As I bit the slice, the juice squirted far landing almost mid-table, ran down my chin as I raised my head — just in time to see my 15-month-old daughter throwing her own kind of breakfast show. She was screaming, refusing her eggs, kicking at the tray, flinging spoons onto the floor.
And then it hit me. I was looking at myself. I am a toddler!
When I lose patience, when I kick at stuck drawers, slam things, curse bureaucracy, or rage at lost time, I’m doing the same thing she does. Just a bit taller and with a driver’s license.
Out of Rhythm
These outbursts almost always come when my inner rhythm doesn’t match the world outside.
For example, this summer I had two weeks alone, while my family stayed at the seaside. During those two usually slow weeks, I moved in flow. I had time to dig deep: building my Docusaurus websites, backing up the multimedia library, pushing company work forward. I felt progress.
It doesn’t count unless it’s a big block of time. A milestone. A finished project.
Now, with my wife and daughter home, life is a string of interruptions. Logistics. Screams. Chaos. I want to carve out whole days for filming, writing, or woodworking, but instead I get scraps: ten minutes here, a half hour there. My mind races into the future, calculating what I can’t get done, so anxiety builds, and I lash out.
The narrative in my head: “It doesn’t count unless it’s a big block of time. A milestone. A finished project.”
But that’s a lie.
The Myth of Milestones
We live in cultures, socialist Yugoslavia where I grew up, capitalist Croatia now, really almost everywhere in the developed western world, that worship milestones. The promotion. The house keys. The gold watch at retirement. The ribbon-cutting photo for the local newspaper.
Everything between those points is treated as filler; waitin, preparation, noise. But life doesn’t happen at the milestones. It happens between them, in the tiny, interrupted bricks we’re so quick to dismiss.
One Sweep
There’s a Zen teaching about sweeping: “One stroke is sweeping. The floor is no cleaner, but the act is complete.“
The point isn’t the spotless floor. The point is recognizing that one sweep is already an act of sweeping. It counts.
Every small brick we lay is part of the cathedral. Sending that one email. Preparing one meal. Writing half a paragraph. Even wiping tomato juice from your chin while you survive another breakfast with a screaming toddler.
None of these are milestones. None will make headlines. But they are the cathedral. And without them, the cathedral doesn’t rise.
Interrupted Seasons
Parenthood has taught me there are seasons. This is not a season of uninterrupted time. It’s a season of chaos, logistics, tantrums, and fatigue.
But instead of fighting that season — demanding that my work life look like it did when I was 25, with days free to obsess over projects — I need to learn how to lay bricks differently. To accept that progress is smaller, slower, fragmented.
And still real.
Building Anyway
When I look back honestly, I see the bricks I already laid for this project:
- 15 published blog posts.
- A working website, hosting, and custom email I set up myself.
- Scripts written for new YouTube episodes.
- The courage to contact a craftsman in Korea whose work inspired me.
None of those felt like “progress” at the time. But together? They’re the foundation of the next stage. The lesson is not to wait for milestones; the lesson is to notice the smallest brick, to put it in place. To whisper to yourself: “This counts. This is building.”
Closing the Circle
Back at the breakfast table, my daughter eventually stopped screaming. She got her way, as toddlers usually d, and I wiped the tomato juice off my chin. I smiled at her, and thought: maybe the trick is not to grow out of being a toddler, but to grow with it.
To notice the little things, to let out the frustration but then move on, to recognize that one spoonful, one sweep, one brick is already life, already progress.
The cathedral isn’t built in leaps. It’s built in mornings like this one.
