v39: The Time I’ve Been Given

Time doesn’t just pass. It gathers. It accrues like sediment, layered in memories, marked by mistakes, and colored by moments that never felt historic when they were happening. I’ve reached version 39 of this experiment called “me,” and if there’s a single thing I’ve learned, it’s this: the best things I’ve built weren’t planned.

I didn’t architect my career with precision. I never wrote “found a wealth firm and a candle company” on a vision board. But here I am, standing inside an unfolding, grateful not for how well a plan was executed, but for how gracefully it came undone.

There was no master spreadsheet, although at times I thought I’d created one. Just a persistent impulse to follow curiosity, avoid easy compromise, and stay alert to the difference between what glitters and what endures. The compass I return to when maps fail isn’t about the next move; it’s about the kind of man I hope to become: thoughtful, principled, present. Someone who chooses depth over ease, integrity over convenience.

II.

My daughter turned five this year. She dances barefoot in the kitchen, often to songs she’s writing in real time. She interrupts conversations with theories about clouds and asks questions that pull me straight into metaphysics before breakfast. She doesn’t just fill the hours. She stretches them.

She reminds me what time once felt like: capacious, unhurried, enchanted. I watch her invent entire lives for her stuffies, and spend twenty minutes examining a single leaf. Meanwhile, I skim emails, double-book appointments, and read essays at 2x speed — a man trying to save time by rushing.

Natalie is still living in a world where a single afternoon contains lifetimes, where making imaginary fish stew deserves the same focus as writing an essay, where swinging as high as the ropes allow is preparation for blasting off to Mars. She’s racing toward some imagined threshold of importance, desperate to be a ‘big kid, but not without pausing to dance, or to ask the kind of follow-up questions that turn simple answers into conversations I never want to end.

She’s becoming.

III.

Kate and I have been growing up together since we were fifteen. Twenty-four years of choosing each other , first as teenagers who barely knew ourselves, then as young adults discovering who we might become, now as parents and partners still becoming.

In real time, the changes are invisible. Day to day, we feel like the same people. But in reflection, the transformation is miraculous, like living in a young forest where growth happens too slowly to perceive, but when you step back, you realize the saplings have become towering trees and the seeds have become a canopy thick enough to create its own weather.

We are not the same people who held hands in high school hallways. Those teenagers could never have imagined the man who manages investment portfolios or the woman who teaches our daughter to be brave. Yet something essential remains continuous, some thread of recognition that says: yes, you. Still you. Always you.

This is what I’ve learned about love from growing up together: it’s not about finding someone perfect. Perfection is a myth. Love is about building something perfect — slowly, imperfectly, together. It’s about watching someone change completely while somehow becoming more themselves. It’s about choosing each other not once, in a moment of passion, but daily, in moments of ordinary Monday-ness.

The world tells us to keep looking, keep optimizing, keep searching for someone who fits our ideal. But Kate and I learned something different: you don’t find your person. You become each other’s person. Through seasons of joy and seasons of surviving. Through versions of yourselves you couldn’t have imagined when you started.

Twenty-four years in, what strikes me most is not how much we’ve changed, but how we’ve changed together — like two trees planted close enough that their roots intertwine and branches bend around each other toward the same light.

IV.

We spent the past year-plus converting our 1939 duplex into a single-family home. Back then, homes were built to last. The plaster walls were thick, applied by craftsmen who understood that shortcuts compound into problems. The hardwood floors were solid oak, not veneer over particleboard. Everything was designed with the assumption that someone would still be living there ninety years later.

I began the project with modern expectations: timelines, efficiency, and optimization. Six months, maybe nine. Certainly no more than twelve.

The house laughed at me.

Eighteen months later, I don’t have a profound takeaway, but I do have a little more perspective. A year is not a long time in the life of a house. It isn’t even a long time in the life of a person, if you’re paying attention. Yes, the dust was constant. The budget swelled. The setbacks stacked up. But we’ll remember this house for its character, not its punctuality.

I’m learning to make peace with that. To let go of the fantasy that everything meaningful can be done quickly or cleanly. Some things — houses, relationships, lives well lived — just take the time they take.

The house is nearly finished now—rooms flow into each other, light moves freely through connected spaces, and the materials feel built to outlast us. We didn’t just renovate; we made something distinctly ours. Not resale neutral. Ours. Rich blues and greens meet warm peach tones on the walls. Fixtures gleam in brass and gold. In a world rushing toward grayscale sameness, that might be enough.

V.

Maybe that’s the lesson of version 39. The things that make life rich aren’t hidden behind some paywall of productivity. They’re just inconvenient to the metrics we’ve been taught to worship.

Love takes time. So does listening. So does writing something worth remembering instead of something merely worth clicking. So does becoming someone whose presence feels like a gift rather than a transaction.

The world keeps insisting we upgrade, outsource, and accelerate. But the best parts of my life — the moments I cherish, the work that reverberates, the days that stay with me — weren’t built that way. They arrived, often unexpectedly, never under budget, and always demanding more patience than I thought I had to give.

VI.

I’ve called this essay The Time I’ve Been Given because I’m learning to see time as a kind of grace I hold.

Not something to be optimized, but something to be honored.

Not something I possess, but something I inhabit.

Not something I hoard, but something I share — with my daughter’s questions and my wife’s laughter.

Yes, I’ve squandered some of it. Filled precious hours with distractions, handed too many mornings to anxiety, let good days slip by while waiting for perfect ones. But I’ve also  started treating time like a relationship worth tending. A little more reverence. A little less grasping.

As for version 40? I don’t have a master plan. But I do have a conviction.

That the most important things won’t be built through hustle, but through presence. That the best conversations happen when phones stay in other rooms. That houses don’t need to be perfect to be sacred. That my wife and I are still writing the early chapters of something rare. And that the real privilege of growing older isn’t getting more time, it’s learning how to be worthy of the time you have.

 Time doesn’t owe me anything. But I owe it my attention.