“You’re a little too wound up, Bob.”

This week has really been rough for me, busyness wise. Not much sadness or anything like that, and nothing heavy has gone down.

Just very, very scattered and tired (but also very, very anxious and convinced I need to knock out lots of things at once).

Something people have said to me often after I’ve told them about losing Dad this summer has been “wow, I can’t imagine how that must feel.”

I always appreciate that, humbly agree that they in fact can’t but work hard to not puff myself up into thinking I’m more special than I ought.

One recent conversation with a new pastor friend stands out as sort of encapsulating one of my biggest anxieties about life without a dad, the life I’ve got ahead of me from here on out; what I shared with Jarad was quite simple:

there’s now nobody in my life to tell me that I’ve become an asshole.

I’ve got a very clear memory of Dad having one time told me, when I was home for a very precisely choreographed weekend I’d managed to break him off, “you’re a little too wound up, Bob” (“Bob” being a nickname that only my most intimate family members call me for reasons I’d prefer to keep special). His way of life was very slow, relaxed, and anti-urgent; mine then (and this week) is very impatient, anti-relaxed and ruthlessly anti-inefficiency.

He was right then and he’d be right now.

Fast forward that scene a year, five years, ten years from now, except that I’m 100% on my own to have found people who’ve cultivated gentle ways to slice through the fog of me being so wound up with Busy and Important Things that I don’t have time for the most cherished in my life to love me in their own way.

Call this one an absence whose presence is still a work in progress.