he moves like time is real
how to want it now and build it slow at the same time.
saturday morning i ran twelve miles. i had coach bennett going in my ear the whole way. he guided. he pushed. he told me when to hold back. somewhere in the middle i worked something out and it felt like it mattered. you can’t let your emotions speed you up. you can’t let the pain or the boredom slow you down. you find something steady and you stay in it, because you know you’re going to be out there a while. i was pleased with myself about it, the way you are when you think you’ve cracked something.
so that afternoon i went to the barbershop. i get my hair cut on saturdays, after the run. same shop, same chair, same barber for years now. i sat down still full of it and told him the whole thing. the pace, the steady part, what i’d worked out around mile eight. he let me finish.
then he told me about the twenty years he spent in prison for something he didn’t do.
suddenly, my twelve miles felt very small.
he moves like time is real. that’s what i kept landing on while he talked.
he went in at nineteen. he came home during covid, got a settlement for the time, and went straight to work. multiple shops now, seven figures, and lately he’s been automating warehouses across the city with ai.
most people would be broken by that. twenty years, institutionalized, and nobody believing you the whole time because everybody in there says they’re innocent too.
whatever it did to him, it didn't stop him.
what got me isn’t the comeback, it’s the how. he never made one big move. he did small things at a high standard every single day and he didn’t stop.
he’s the most patient person i know. he’s also the fastest. that should be a contradiction. it isn’t.
urgency is about how you treat time. speed is about how you treat steps. he can’t get twenty years back, so he won’t waste an hour. he also knows a shop doesn’t get built in a weekend. same man, same morning, no conflict between them.
i have it backwards. i’m casual with the time and impatient with the steps. i’ll lose a whole tuesday without noticing, then quit something in week three because it hasn’t worked yet.
you probably know the version of this. the calendar feels like there’s plenty of it. the process feels like it should already be done.
my twelve miles was a morning. his was twenty years. same instruction at two sizes, and i only heard it properly the second time.
you can’t skip to the person you want to be. you build them in small pieces. wanting it badly doesn’t change that. the wanting is what keeps you from wasting the week.
— brylan.