The Argument I Keep Having With Reality

Every July, life gets just quiet enough for me to hear an argument I've been having all year.

Not with another person. With reality.

It usually sounds something like this:

This isn't how I thought summer would go.

This isn't how I pictured Christmas morning.

This isn't how parenting was supposed to feel.

This isn't where I thought my business would be by now.

This isn't the version of life I had in my head.

I've started to notice that some of my greatest exhaustion has very little to do with what's actually happening. It comes from arguing with what's happening.

Christmas morning is probably the clearest example for me.
For years, I carried a picture in my head of what Christmas morning was supposed to look like. The same excitement. The same anticipation. A magical morning that unfolded the way it did for me as a kid.

That has never really been our reality.

One daughter is fully engaged in the magic of it all. The other has completely different plans. Even after all these years, that reality can still sting. If I'm being honest, the guilt that my typical daughter has never experienced the Christmas morning I imagined for her can break my heart if I stay there too long.

But somewhere along the way, I realized I wasn't just grieving the Christmas I imagined.

I was overlooking the one we were creating.

The laughter. The traditions we never planned but somehow became ours. The funny moments we still talk about years later. The family we actually are.

That realization didn't just change Christmas. It changed the way I started thinking about my life.

For years, I thought the pivots were what exhausted me. My life requires a lot of them. More than I would ever choose for myself. There was a time when I was resentful about that. F'n angry, if I'm being honest.

Eventually I realized something.

The pivots weren't exhausting me.

Fighting the pivots was.

What's interesting is that this isn't a problem I have in sports.

Put me on a field, court, or diamond and I'll adjust all day long. If it's raining, you play in the rain. If the other team is better than you expected, you figure it out. If the game plan isn't working, you change it. You don't spend the game wishing you had a different opponent. You play the one that's in front of you because that's the only game available.

Somehow I forgot to do that in real life.

Instead, I kept comparing reality to the picture in my head. I kept thinking life would feel lighter if the circumstances changed. Instead, what changed everything was realizing that I wasn't exhausted by reality. I was exhausted by the argument I was having with it.

That's a very different problem.

Because some things deserve to be grieved. Some things are genuinely hard. This isn't about pretending otherwise. But I've learned there's a difference between grieving something and living there.These days, I still visit the land of "it should have been different." I just don't stay there as long.

Maybe that's all July has ever been trying to give me.

Not a better summer.

Just enough quiet to hear the argument.

And maybe that's why sports have always made so much sense to me.

The game doesn't care about the conditions you wished for.

It simply asks if you're willing to play.