Tag: self-care

Eight O’clock

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Friday I slept until after eight.

I’ve done that maybe twice in ten years. I’m up at 5:30 every day, not because anyone makes me — I like it, it’s the quietest part of the day and it belongs to me. But Friday I woke up at some point, looked at the clock, and went back under.

It took two weekends of practice to get there. First one I made myself stay in bed until seven and it felt like being late for something. Did it again the next day. Then Friday, eight.

What finally landed it wasn’t discipline. My wife looked at me and said, “You’re exhausted. Sleep in.”

Our team just brought a project across the line at work. Ten months of build, a go-live date that wouldn’t stick, the whole thing.

I want to be careful how I describe this, because I liked it. I’ve spent twelve years doing large project work and I’d take that kind of pressure any day — you plan a thing, you build it, and then people use it. That’s about as satisfying as work gets.

What wears on you isn’t the hours. It’s carrying, for ten months, the awareness that if this doesn’t hold, it doesn’t fail quietly. It fails at enterprise scale, in front of everyone, on Monday. You don’t put that down at 5 p.m. You just carry it at a lower volume.

And then it launches, and you’re still braced, because your body didn’t attend the meeting where we decided it was over.

I wrote something years ago about being in a current.

The idea was that most of the time being busy feels like water moving you along — responsibility, deadlines, the list, everyone counting on you. You put your head down and paddle to keep up, and after a while you stop noticing anything except the water.

And the current isn’t deep. That was the whole point of it. You can put your feet down and stand up in the middle of it any time you decide to. You can walk to the bank and watch it go by. It was never actually in charge.

I still believe that. What I’d add now is that standing up is not a thing I do by myself. Twice this month it took my wife on the bank telling me the water wasn’t as deep as I thought.

There’s an old Alabama song about being in a hurry and not knowing why.

I’ve had it stuck in my head, and not because it describes me. I’m not in a hurry to get my life over with. I like my life — I like being married to her, I like being my son’s dad, I like building things. When I catch myself rushing and can’t say what for, that’s not a mood. That’s information.

Because hurry and performance are not the same animal. When I’m performing I know the goal and I know why it matters and I can tell you which things don’t. Hurry is what shows up when I haven’t decided any of that, so everything arrives equally urgent and I just thrash. One is chosen. The other is drift wearing a productivity costume.

Here’s the bill.

I’m not dissatisfied with my life. But when I think honestly about what I’d want back, it isn’t projects and it isn’t time. It’s people. There are friendships I’d have built more deliberately. There are people I liked who I let drift because I was in the water with my head down and I’d have told you, sincerely, that I’d get to it.

Nobody isolates on purpose. You just stay busy long enough and the number of people you’re actually close to gets smaller, and no single week is when it happened.

That’s the real cost of the current. It doesn’t take your hours. It takes your people, slowly, while you’re being responsible.

Tomorrow morning it’s supposed to be sixty-eight degrees, which in Oklahoma on the second of August is close to a miracle.

I’m going to put headphones on and mow the yard before church. Listen to a book and drive around the lawn like it’s a go-kart. Same chore either way. The grass doesn’t care.

That’s about as far as I’ve gotten. Head up, feet down, and somebody on the bank who’ll tell me when I’ve stopped noticing the water.

The Room I Can’t Read

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Round 5 Day 1

I recorded four minutes of thoughts on my walk this morning and never stumbled once. Then I sat down to film a thirty-second video saying the same thing, and my brain locked up.

That gap has bothered me for a while, because on paper it makes no sense. I’m a Toastmaster. I did theater. I’ve stood in front of full rooms and ad-libbed my way through, and I was fine — better than fine. Put a phone in front of me in an empty room and I freeze.

For a long time I told myself it was the camera. Being watched. But that’s not it. I record my thoughts out loud every single day on my walks and it’s effortless. Same guy, same microphone. The only thing that changes is where the audio is going. One version is just me, organizing what I think. The other is going out to people.

Here’s what I finally landed on: when I’m in a live room, I can read it. I can see which points are landing, who’s leaning in, where to push and where to let go. I ad-lib because the room is talking back to me the whole time. Online, there’s none of that. You send it out into nothing. You have no idea if anyone’s watching, if it’s hitting, if it matters at all. You’re basically talking to yourself and hoping. And without the room to read, I lose the thing I’ve always leaned on.

So I overcorrect. If I can’t read the room, I’ll make the words perfect instead. I’ll get it exactly right the first time so I don’t have to record it over and over. That’s the Toastmaster in me — I want a well-framed talk, not a ramble. Except the demand for perfect is what freezes me before I ever start.

Then I noticed where I don’t do this. Work.

I sit in meetings and I’ll start talking before I actually know what I’m saying, and somewhere in the middle I realize I do know — I just needed to hear myself get there. I give myself that grace at work without thinking about it. And I know why. Twenty years in, I trust that if I open my mouth, what comes out is worth a little credence, even half-formed. So I let myself think out loud.

On camera, for the things I actually care about — the writing, the ideas outside my day job — I haven’t earned that yet. Not in my own head. So I won’t let myself be half-formed. I make myself audition for the right to speak before every take.

That’s the real thing under the freeze. It was never the camera. It’s that the perfect-first-take I demand of myself is a stand-in for an authority I haven’t built yet. And the uncomfortable part is knowing you can’t build it in private. Nobody hands you credence for the videos you didn’t post.

The Third of July

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Planning Week

My son and I don’t get out alone much. Tonight we did.

Our town shoots fireworks on the third and the fourth, so my wife kissed us both goodnight and sent us off — just the two of us, no plan beyond finding a spot and watching the sky come apart.

He’s graduated now. I’ve started doing the math I don’t like doing — how many of these are left before the evenings out are the ones he drives to on his own, in another town, with his own life pulling at him. Hopefully we have several left, but these are special. So I’m not going to waste this one narrating it. I’m going to go watch fireworks with my boy.

Happy Fourth. Go find your people while they’re still in reach.

The Dream You Never Actually Wanted

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Rest Week

I saw a quote today on social media. You’ve seen a version of it a hundred times: We only get one life. So why aren’t you running as hard as you can toward your wildest dreams?

It was attached to somebody’s website. There was a famous name stapled to it for credibility, and the guy delivering it had that urgency in his voice — the kind that exists to move you toward a buy button. I know that sound. I’ve studied it. And the moment I clock it, my guard goes up.

But here’s the thing that bugged me. Strip away the sales funnel, and the line underneath is still true. Our time is precious. We do only get the one. So why does the truth feel so cheap the second somebody uses it to sell me something?

I think it’s because they’re answering the wrong question. They’re handing you the answer — here’s what you should want, here’s how fast you should chase it — when the actual work is learning to ask a better question in the first place.

I’m not interested in finding “my own truth” the way the motivational crowd sells it — the version with a buy button attached. I want something harder. I want the truth about my situation.

Am I actually interested in this thing, or have I just been sold it? Am I talented at it, or am I pretending? What’s the real baseline of who I am and what I’m good at — not the version I’d like to post, the real one? Because until I can answer that, I can’t tell the difference between a dream and a fantasy.

A dream has legs. You can put a plan under it and walk toward it. I am never going to be a rock star — I don’t have the voice, the stage presence, or honestly the desire to grind it out. Do I ever picture myself singing to a stadium and selling a million albums? Sure. But that’s a fantasy. It collapses the second I’m honest about my talent, my time, and what I’m actually willing to do. The trouble is, most people name their fantasies as dreams, then stand in the mirror and beat themselves up for not reaching things they were never built to reach.

None of this works without a foundation of honesty. And I’m not writing it as someone who cracked the code and came down the mountain to hand it to you. I’m the lab rat. Every framework I build, I test on myself first, and I report back what actually happened — not what was supposed to happen.

So here’s my live example.

I started this year with the 7-40 challenge. One goal was to work out an hour a day, almost every day. And I found out something useful: I can do that. Reliably. I show up.

The scale, though, hasn’t moved the way I said I wanted it to. And the reason isn’t mysterious. I enjoy food. I set a range for myself and I’ve mostly lived at the top of it. The exercise is honest. The eating is honest. The goal was where I was lying.

Here’s where it gets interesting. Is there actually a gap?

If I’m enjoying food and holding steady — not gaining, just moving slowly — am I failing, or am I doing exactly what I want? That’s the question almost nobody asks. We assume the gap is real because we declared a goal once and haven’t hit it. But some gaps are imaginary. They only exist because we never honestly defined what we wanted in the first place.

When I’m truthful about it, here’s what I find: I’m choosing slower progress and more enjoyment over a faster, more miserable version. I’d rather not burn out. That’s a legitimate thing to want. But I have to name it — out loud, to myself — instead of pretending I’m chasing rapid results and quietly failing at them. The shame only shows up when I lie about what I’m actually after.

Once I named it, the gap closed. Not because anything about my body changed. Because I stopped measuring myself against a goal I never actually wanted.

A Good Goodbye

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Rest Week

Thirteen years ago, my grandmother was home, slowly waiting for the cancer to take her.

I knew she was near the end. She lived about an hour and a half away, so I called and asked if I could come early. I drove down, and that morning I cooked her breakfast. We sat across from each other and we talked — about my job, the master’s degree I was working on, my family.

I knew Grandmas aren’t supposed to play favorites. But she was proud of me, and I felt it.

I told her I loved her. I told her I was proud to be her grandson — proud to be working in the same business my grandfather had been in. I told her I wanted to make her proud.

She smiled and said I already had.

I knew, the whole time, that it would be our last conversation. And because I knew, I got to choose what kind of goodbye it would be. I wanted it to be a good one. It was.

There are only a few people in this life I miss the way I miss her. She gave the best hugs. She believed in me. She trusted me. And I didn’t let her down.

That morning gave me a clarity I’ve never forgotten. When you know the moment matters — when you know it’s the last one — everything unimportant falls away and you’re left with only the things worth saying. I love you. I’m proud of you. Thank you.

We don’t always get to know which conversation is the last one. That morning, I did. And I’ve tried ever since to talk to the people I love like I might not get another chance.