The other day, I was waiting for my dogs to finish their Very Important Search for Squirrels in the woods by our elementary school. I was passing the time by watching two kids being pushed on the swing by two dads.
For those of you not familiar with this activity, swing-pushing is a relentless job. Any kid under the age of 6 will happily be pushed on a swing 60 minutes or more, rain or shine, without any need to stop.
If you’re the parent, and if it’s cold or windy or sunny or hot, or if you just find 60 minutes of pushing to be a long time, it can be easy to get impatient, or even frustrated.
“I can’t believe I’m stuck doing this [repetitive, boring, whatever] thing again!”
It helps to remember that nearly everything only happens once.
Once in this context.
Once at this stage of my life.
Once with this set of people.
And so it goes outside the playground as well.
Having a hard time at work? Once.
Having challenges in a relationship? Once.
Having some great things happening in your life mixed in with things that are stressful, or distracting? Once.
One day, you stop going to the swings and never look back.
One day, a decade has passed—for you, for them—and you can hardly imagine what it would be like to be a dad who spent most of his free time pushing swings (or solving this particular problem, or working with this group of people on this hard but interesting thing…).
It’s so easy to forget that the here and now whips by us, that we can never step in the same river twice.
The reminder is to shift our perception from “I have to do this thing [seemingly] forever” to “I get to do this thing with these people in this way once and only once.”
