There is a scene in Stick, Owen Wilson’s new TV series about a distraught professional golf player, that really stuck with me: as the character struggles with the loss of his 4-year old to cancer, he dreams not of spending “quality time” with his kid but of the little daily things that he’ll never get to experience like yelling at him to turn down the volume, or scolding him for a small annoyance.
This scene in turn reminded me of Seinfield’s “garbage time”. He argues against the mirage of parents’ “quality time” with their kids:
“I’m a believer in the ordinary and the mundane. These guys that talk about ‘quality time’ – I always find that a little sad when they say, ‘We have quality time.’ I don’t want quality time. I want the garbage time. That’s what I like. You just see them in their room reading a comic book and you get to kind of watch that for a minute, or [having] a bowl of Cheerios at 11 o’clock at night when they’re not even supposed to be up. The garbage, that’s what I love.”
While I wrestle with my two-year old to change her diaper I am reminded to enjoy the moment, kids grow so fast, I’ve been a father for less than two years and I can’t remember how life was before having kids, despite the immense change in routines, being tired all day, every day, there’s nothing more gratifying than spending time with your kids. While many parents complain about being their kids cook, driver, cleaner, I think of my dad who drove me, my sister and cousins to school every day. He enjoyed and still reminisces those mornings with 5 sleepy, sometimes cranky kids in the car.
As I reflect on those seemingly trivial moments with my own daughter, and those cherished school-drives of my dad, I realize that this mindset doesn’t apply just to parenting. It applies to everything, it applies to life itself. Just last week I was frustrated about a strategy discussion with my cofounder, we were not seeing eye-to-eye on an important matter and the task wasn’t us arguing but that my expectation was wrong. I was hoping for us to be totally aligned, to not “waste” time. I was idealizing what it means to run and grow a business, the stuff you see on Instagram and social media, the overnight success that never are (they take years).
Expectation and idealizing life rob you of the present moment. Instead of longing for quality time and wasting time waiting, flip your mindset, take in every moment in its fullness, and start living.