Looking Up
The other evening I was sitting under a gazebo on the sideline, watching one of my sons at football training.
If you’ve spent years ferrying children to clubs, you’ll know the scene. Camping chairs appear from car boots, someone has remembered a flask, someone else has forgotten a coat even though it’s October, younger siblings are making up their own games on the edge of the pitch and parents settle into that familiar rhythm of watching, chatting and quietly getting on with life while training carries on in front of them.
I had my laptop with me.
It seemed like the sensible thing to do. Sixty minutes is a long time when you’re juggling work, family life and everything else that comes with both. I’ve been carrying my laptop around with me since 2009! I replied to a few emails, made notes for an article, answered a message from school and worked through a list of jobs that had been sitting in my head all day. Every so often I’d glance up to watch the session before returning to the screen.
At some point I looked up for a little longer.
The boys were laughing about something one of the coaches had said. A younger brother had decided he was joining in from the sidelines with his own imaginary football. A few parents had drifted into conversation. The evening light had softened in that way it does just before the sun starts to disappear.
Nothing remarkable had happened.
Which is probably why the moment stayed with me.
I realised I had spent most of the session physically there, but mentally somewhere else. I hadn’t missed a spectacular goal or an important conversation. I’d simply missed sixty minutes of ordinary life unfolding in front of me because I’d convinced myself that using the time productively was the sensible thing to do.
The more I thought about it afterwards, the more I wondered when we became so uncomfortable with simply being where we are.
Every spare moment seems to come with an expectation attached to it. Waiting for football training becomes an opportunity to answer emails. Sitting in the swimming pool gallery becomes time to organise the week ahead. Standing in a supermarket queue becomes a chance to catch up on messages. Even waiting for the kettle to boil feels like enough time to check the headlines.
I’m not convinced any of us decided to live like this.
I think it just happened.
Technology has made it possible to carry work, shopping, banking, school communication and endless information around in our pockets. That’s incredibly useful. I wouldn’t willingly go back to the days of forgotten permission slips arriving by post or having to queue in a bank on a Saturday morning.
At the same time, I wonder what we’ve quietly traded for all that convenience.
Not because I think the answer is to abandon smartphones or pretend modern family life isn’t busy. It is busy. Families have always had plates to spin, and most of us are doing the best we can with the time we’ve got.
What feels different now is that the gaps have disappeared.
Those little pockets of waiting that used to exist almost by accident have become opportunities to do something else. We don’t really wait anymore. We fill.
Perhaps that’s why so many of us feel permanently behind, even when we’re constantly catching up.
I’ve been thinking about attention more than time recently.
Time is fixed. We all know that.
Attention is different.
It’s pulled in a hundred directions before breakfast. It follows us into work, into family life, into the car, onto the football sideline and back home again. It rarely gets the chance to settle.
The irony is that the moments we often remember most vividly aren’t the productive ones.
They’re the ordinary ones.
The conversation on the drive home that went somewhere unexpected.
Watching a child finally master something they’ve been trying to do for weeks.
The ridiculous joke that everyone still laughs about years later.
The walk back to the car in the rain.
The evening when nothing much happened at all.
Those moments don’t usually announce themselves as important while they’re happening.
That’s why they’re so easy to overlook.
As I drove home that evening, I found myself wondering how many of those moments I’d already missed because I’d been looking somewhere else.
Not through neglect.
Not through lack of love.
Simply because I’d become so used to filling every spare minute that I’d forgotten there was value in leaving some of them empty.
That thought has stayed with me ever since.
Perhaps that’s what I hope this publication will encourage, not just in its readers but in me as well. Not a different family life, because most of us are living exactly the one we’re supposed to be living. Just a slightly different way of looking at it.
A little more curiosity.
A little less rushing.
A few more moments of looking up.
What I’d like to get better at is noticing when I’m somewhere special disguised as somewhere ordinary.
A football pitch on a Tuesday evening probably doesn’t sound particularly memorable.
I have a feeling, though, that one day I’ll realise it was.
