restraint

The hardest thing I’ve ever done was absolutely nothing. And I had to do it on purpose.

My son was struggling. I could see it. The kind of struggle that makes a parent’s hands itch to fix, to solve, to step in. I knew what I needed to do. I had the answer. And I had the power to make it happen.

I just had to choose not to.

As a parent, we’re often supposed to act. But using my power to solve my son’s problem would have robbed him of the opportunity to come up with his own solution.

A similar battle shows up anywhere power lives. A manager watches an employee wrestle with a project they could resolve in ten minutes. Someone who is financially secure watches a friend barely scrape by. The person with answers sits across from a colleague who is searching. We feel the urge intensely. We can solve this. We possess what they lack.

Except our help often isn’t helpful. Stepping in feeds our need to be useful more than it serves them. Handling their problem actually steals the hard-won satisfaction of figuring it out on their own.

But here’s where it gets slippery.

What if I wasn’t practicing restraint with my son? What if I was just avoiding the discomfort of getting involved? I could tell myself I was giving him room to grow. But maybe I was actually abandoning him. Maybe I was protecting myself from the complexities of staying engaged.

A parent who never gets involved isn’t practicing restraint. They’re just plain absent. A manager who regularly watches their employees drown isn’t building capacity. They’re neglectful. The friend who has resources but never offers them isn’t trusting the process. They’re protecting themselves.

The difference between wisdom and cowardice can be razor thin. Both involve not acting. Both use the same language. Respecting autonomy. Not interfering. Letting people find their own way.

So how do we know which side of the line we’re on? We don’t.

My son eventually found his way through. But I still can’t tell you if my restraint helped or if he succeeded despite it. I sat with that uncertainty the entire time. I’m sitting with it now.

Grappling with that kind of ambiguity is hard work. Staying awake to each decision. Wrestling with it instead of applying a “rule to live by” we adopted years ago. Doing nothing on purpose instead of by default.

We get it wrong when we stop wrestling. When we decide on an approach before the situation arrives: always step in or never offer help.

Restraint requires us to stay present. We become aware of our own discomfort and ask what it’s telling us. And then we act (or don’t), knowing we might be wrong.

bloodshot dreams

At 2:30 AM in a small apartment in France, everything went sideways. Flying across an ocean to meet someone you’ve fallen in love with through letters can be both an incredibly romantic gesture and a spectacular failure. Sometimes simultaneously.

After traveling for hours and battling sleep through what felt like the most important conversation of my life, my eyes were so bloodshot I looked like I’d been mainlining hot sauce.

I’d met Heather at a friend’s wedding in the States. Once she returned home to France, we began corresponding across an ocean. It was as if we were crafting a Jane Austen romance, but with better postal service. Something that felt real enough to risk everything on.

Before leaving America, I had imagined what it would be like to see her. To talk with her. 

In my mind, we were literary characters destined for a perfect reunion. Doves appearing on cue. Surely, nothing could go wrong.

Just as I had envisioned, she was real. She was wonderful. We talked for four straight hours like lifelong friends reuniting after decades apart. My jet-lagged brain was doing victory laps while occasionally losing basic motor functions. I knocked over her water glass twice. I kept yawning mid-sentence like a narcoleptic golden retriever. But somehow this came across as charming rather than pitiful. Things were going even better than I had dared to imagine.

By 2:30 AM, my eyes looked like roadmaps to hell drawn by a drunk cartographer. But somehow, in my foggy brain, this seemed like the perfect moment to escalate things romantically. Apparently “international man of romance” isn’t a real job qualification. I had confused “bold sentimental gesture” with “delirious poor judgment.”

I wanted to kiss her. It felt natural. The perfect crescendo to our transatlantic symphony of connection. I was basically expecting orchestral music to swell as I leaned in. Destiny was beckoning.

“May I kiss you?” I asked.

No buildup. No subtle approach. A man who looked like he’d been through a wind tunnel asking a woman for a kiss while swaying slightly from exhaustion.

“No,” she said kindly. Just no. My romantic instinct had become a face-plant in record time.

“Oh,” I managed to croak out. It was somehow both too much and not enough of a response. “That’s… okay. That’s totally… yeah.”

I sat there looking like I was processing information through molasses. How had I misread four hours of wonderful conversation so spectacularly? 

The silence was so awkward I could practically hear it echoing. Here I was. I had crossed an ocean. I had stayed awake through heroic levels of exhaustion. Only to discover I had the timing of a broken clock and the sensitivity of a caffeinated squirrel.

What happened after the “no”? She graciously took me to an apartment where I would sleep. Then she returned to her flat. She left me alone with my wounded ego.

I lay there in the dark for the next three hours mentally rewriting the scene. Each version was worse than the last. In one version, I asked permission to ask permission. In another, I missed her mouth entirely and kissed her forehead like an awkward uncle.

I spent considerable time wondering if I had just destroyed something beautiful. Had I wanted too much too soon? Was I too eager, too delirious in my approach?

But real dreams, the ones worth crossing oceans for, are apparently more resilient than we think.

A few days later, she kissed me. I’d finally slept enough to look human again. We’d spent hours walking through markets and talking about everything except that moment. She didn’t kiss me because she felt sorry for my previous performance. Something new had grown in the meantime.

Turns out my bloodshot dream wasn’t wrong. Just premature. Like a Christmas present opened in October.

What I thought was the obvious next step was simply a few steps ahead of where we actually were. I had skipped chapters in a story that was still being written.

Years later, Heather became my wife. Every so often one of us tells this story at a party. Not as the night she gave me the brush-off. But as the night I flew across an ocean and asked for a kiss while looking like I’d been run over by a truck.

My bloodshot eyes weren’t proof the dream was dying. They were proof that I was awake enough to live through my own romantic disaster.

Dreams, it turns out, unfold according to their own schedule. 

remains

We tell stories about who dead people were. We make connections between their choices, their struggles, their moments of grace or failure.

This can feel like wisdom. As if we’ve learned something true about them now that the noise of their existence has ceased. We might even experience guilt that it took their dying for us to see them clearly.

But we might not be seeing them clearly at all. We’re just seeing them differently. 

When someone is alive, they keep disrupting our understanding of them. They surprise us. They act out of character. Challenge our assumptions about them. Refuse to be who we thought they were. They grow or regress or contradict themselves. Our understanding of them stays provisional because they won’t hold still.

Then death freezes them in the moment they stopped. But strangely, our understanding of who they were keeps moving, reshaping itself around the gaps they left, the questions they can no longer answer.

Now they become whoever we need them to be in order to navigate their absence. The difficult father becomes the man who did his best. Or the man who damaged us beyond repair. The distant friend becomes the person who truly saw us. Or the relationship that never really mattered. The parent we didn’t visit becomes someone we understood completely. Or someone we never knew at all.

Hindsight can make any of these versions feel true. It provides evidence for whichever story we’re telling. It convinces us we’ve finally grasped who people were, what they meant to us, what we should have done differently.

But confidence doesn’t ensure accuracy.