The Breakfast and the Park
Yesterday was one of those rare, almost mythical days, one of the top three days of my life! Just me and my daughter; no meetings, no deadlines, no rush. My wife was away, and I stayed home with our little girl. The world shrank to the size of our apartment, the park, and the slow rhythm of her needs—breakfast, laughter, naps, diapers. Mundane, tiny, real.
I fed her lunch: some vegetables, bread, small bites of chicken, and at one point she started teasing me. I’d give her a piece, she’d put it up to my mouth, and just as I’d lean in to take a bite, she’d pull it back and laugh hysterically. I’d kiss her face, her tiny little hand, she’d squeal, and we’d start all over again. Simple, stupid, perfect.
After lunch we went to the kiddie park. The air was golden and heavy with late afternoon warmth. We sat on a little concrete wall near the basketball court. She watched the older kids running, their sneakers squeaking, the ball echoing against the pavement. Every few seconds she’d turn toward the trees, spot a bird, and point. “Tsstss!” she’d say, her small hand lifting, eyes wide. I’d hold her close, my arms wrapped around her waist so she wouldn’t fall, and she’d lean back into me, giggling, safe.
There was no plan, no next task, o clock in my head ticking away the seconds of my “productive” life. Just us, sitting there, breathing. For once, I wasn’t trying to get through anything. I was simply in it.
Every time in my life that I’ve —truly— felt happy, there was no rush.
It hit me later that night: every time in my life that I’ve truly felt happy, there was no rush. The moments that stayed — riding my old motorcycle with no destination, sitting by a river until the sun went down, wandering through a misty forest with my camera — all of them had one thing in common. Timelessness. The absence of “next.”
It’s the same feeling I had yesterday with my daughter. There was no agenda, no clock. Just flow. And I can’t help but think that everything that’s destroying us, our anxiety, our disconnection, our inability to be still, all of it stems from this insane relationship we’ve built with time. We’ve industrialized it; we’ve turned life into a sequence of slots to be filled, optimized, monetized.
We call it progress. I call it the tyranny of time.
Natural rhythm
It wasn’t always like this; time used to be rhythm, not schedule. It used to move in circles — the sun, the seasons, the growth of crops, the rhythm of work and rest. You worked until the work was done, not until the clock struck five, you rested because the body asked for it, not because your calendar said “Lunch break.” You walked until your legs felt heavy, and then you stopped. The world made sense because the rhythm of life was organic, human.
Then came the machine, the factory bell, the punch card, the commute. Then came the email notification, the meeting invite, the productivity app. Then came progress. And progress, as it turns out, doesn’t care much for peace.
Progress doesn’t care much for peace.
Now, even our leisure is scheduled. We book rest, we schedule walks, we go to therapy to learn how to breathe, we rush through dinners, scroll through sunsets, and multitask our way through every conversation. We wear our exhaustion like a badge. We say we don’t have time, but what we really mean is that we’ve handed it over to someone else—to our bosses, our phones, our calendars. To the ticking monster we created and can no longer stop.
What used to be natural, connection, silence, presence, is now a discipline. We need apps to remind us to “be mindful.” Watches nudge us to “take a deep breath.” as if our own bodies no longer trust us to remember how to live.
And children, they’re the last humans on Earth who haven’t learned this madness. They don’t understand hurry. They can’t! Their world is made of textures and sounds and moments. A child doesn’t wake up thinking, “We have to be at the park by 10.” She wakes up thinking, “There’s light outside. There’s breakfast. There’s mama. There’s papa.” Every second is its own eternity.
That’s why they resist our rushing, that’s why they cry when we hurry them, why dressing them takes forever, why putting on shoes becomes a twenty-minute battle. It’s not defiance, it’s the human soul refusing to be compressed into seconds. It’s life, in its purest form, saying: slow down.
What is parenting, if not presence? What is art, or work, or even friendship, if not presence?
Yesterday proved it to me—the rush kills joy. It kills love, it kills connection. I realized that every meltdown, every frustration, every small family quarrel we’ve had over the past year has had one common denominator—time pressure.
“We’re late.”
“We have to go.”
“I have to finish this.”
“You said we’d be there by five.”
These sentences are poison. They don’t just steal peace, they steal presence. And what is parenting, if not presence? What is art, or work, or even friendship, if not presence?
We keep saying we don’t have enough time, but it’s not true. We just don’t have enough unmeasured time. The kind that isn’t owned by the clock. The kind where life unfolds instead of being managed.
The Absurd
I keep thinking about the absurdity of it all, this world we’ve built. We wake up with alarms, hurry through breakfast, rush into the same rush-hour traffic as millions of others, to arrive at the same time, in the same place, to sit under the same fluorescent lights, staring at the same screens. Then, when we’re finally done, we hurry again, to the gym, to the store, to pick up the kids, to cook, to scroll, to rest, to sleep.
And we call this life.
We move faster, but feel less. We produce more, but connect less. We’re so efficient that we’ve completely lost our sense of sufficiency. When I look at my daughter, when I feed her, when she giggles and steals the spoon from my hand, when we just exist together, I see something that no machine, no schedule, no productivity system can replicate. The unmeasured joy of simply being alive.
And I think, maybe this is the only way to heal. Maybe this is what my whole life has been trying to teach me — that peace doesn’t come from control or from finishing everything on time. It comes from realizing that life doesn’t care about your clock. It doesn’t run on seconds, it runs on breath, it runs on love.
The Rebellion
So maybe the real rebellion today isn’t quitting your job, moving to the woods, or throwing away your phone; maybe it’s something quieter, smaller. It’s sitting with your child on a park bench and letting the afternoon unfold. It’s refusing to rush. It’s reclaiming your time — not to fill it with more, but to empty it enough for life to fit back in.
Because every time I stop rushing, I discover that time isn’t my enemy at all. It’s my ally. It just wants me to slow down long enough to remember that I’m alive.
