Thursday Swimming and Pints

For the last ten years, I have religiously taken my son swimming on a Thursday. Afterwards, I get him something to eat, he usually runs around the gym like a madman, and I have a pint or two.

I love my Thursdays.

We swim quite a lot anyway, but there has always been something slightly different about Thursday. It feels like the point in the week where everything starts to slow down a bit. Work is nearly done, the weekend is not far away, and for an hour or so we are just in the water. We both love swimming and I have always found something calming about it. Even when James is doing his absolute best to make it anything but calming.

Last night his little mate had come round after school, so she came with us. She is not actually a member of the gym, which meant carrying out the usual covert operation to get her through the turnstiles.

We have become surprisingly good at this.

The basic technique involves the two of them arguing while I stand there pretending to be increasingly stressed because the machine apparently will not let us through. A bit of pushing and shoving and eventually everybody gets waved through.

Works a treat.

James was full of questions on the way there, which is fairly normal.

“What would happen if there was no wind?”

I had absolutely no fucking idea.

That was not the answer I gave him. I produced some vague dad explanation about weather and temperature while secretly hoping he would move on to something I actually understood.

He did not.

So later I Googled it.

Apparently things would get fairly catastrophic, temperatures would become extreme and ultimately we would all be in quite a lot of trouble. Nice little conversation for the drive to swimming.

Swimming itself was good, apart from the fact James had brought a water pistol and spent most of the session doing my head in with it.

Afterwards we went to Wagamama for something to eat. At some point James asked if he could have my phone, so I gave it to him. Within about two minutes he was bored of that as well.

Then completely out of nowhere he looked at me and said, “Dad, what is the meaning of life?”

I was halfway through a mouthful of noodles and chicken.

What a question.

He is ten years old and has casually dropped one of the biggest questions human beings have been trying to answer for thousands of years while I am trying not to get sauce down my top.

I actually started thinking about it.

Properly thinking about it.

I am sitting there in Wagamama like Socrates, trying to come up with some profound dad answer that he might remember years from now. Something wise. Something meaningful. Something that would make me sound like I had actually worked life out.

By the time I had nearly constructed my answer, he had completely forgotten he had asked the question.

He and his mate were sitting opposite me with chopsticks sticking out of their mouths, trying to talk to each other.

They looked like a pair of absolute knobheads. but they were happy and they were belly laughing.

Not polite little laughs either. Proper laughing where you cannot really breathe and the more stupid the other person looks, the funnier it gets.

I sat there watching them and suddenly thought that perhaps James had answered his own question without even realising it.

He was not sitting there thinking about what had happened at school that day. He was not worrying about what he had to do when he got home. He was not thinking about next week, next year, whether he was achieving enough or wondering if buying noodles had left him short until payday.

He was just there.

Completely absorbed in whatever ridiculous thing was happening in front of him.

For those few minutes there was nowhere else he needed to be and nothing else he needed to sort out. He was simply living his life while it was happening.

That sounds ridiculously obvious when you write it down, but I think we get surprisingly bad at it as we get older.

We spend an enormous amount of time waiting for some future version of our life to arrive. We tell ourselves things will feel better when work calms down, when we earn a bit more, when the kids are older, when the house is sorted, when we lose some weight, when the difficult decision has been made or whatever problem is currently occupying our head finally disappears.

Then we will relax.

Then we will enjoy ourselves.

Then life can properly start.

The trouble is there is always another thing.

I have written before about losing my dad and other people I have lost, and those experiences definitely changed how I think about time. They made me appreciate how fragile life can be, but there is a difference between understanding that intellectually and actually living like you understand it.

I still rush.

I still overthink things that have not happened yet and replay things that already have. I still convince myself occasionally that I just need to get through whatever is happening now and then everything will somehow settle down.

It never really does.

Life just changes shape.

I have always been ambitious and I do not think there is anything wrong with that. I was alright at football when I was younger. Not as good as James is now, annoyingly, but I worked hard enough to play semi-professionally. Later I worked my balls off in my career and ended up becoming an HSEQ Director at 34.

I enjoyed a lot of that job and had a brilliant team, although I could probably write a whole book about the insanity of working for a mad SME full of chancers.

Some of the things I witnessed in that company, which somehow turned over £60 million a year, are genuinely comical when I look back. At the time they weren't quite as funny. I'd go home and tell my wife there had been another kick-off in work and that one person had ended up with somebody else in a headlock. She'd look at me completely seriously and say, “You need to speak to HR about that.” I'd have to explain that the person with them in the headlock was HR.

That probably tells you everything you need to know about the place. I remember sitting in board meetings looking at a sea of red on the financial performance reports while cans of lager sat on the table. It was absolute madness at times, but weirdly I learned more about people, pressure and myself in that company than I probably would have done somewhere that operated like a normal business.

They do not cover that one in leadership courses.

I am proud of what I have achieved and I still want to achieve more. I still want to build things, try new things and occasionally convince myself that some ridiculous idea is going to change everything.

I do not think the lesson here is to stop planning for the future or stop being ambitious. We should absolutely set goals, take risks and go after things that seem difficult.

The danger is believing that our real life begins once we get there.

I am 45 now.

In my head I am still about 21, although mirrors, recovery times and the occasional hamstring problem provide reasonably strong evidence to the contrary.

The older I get, the more conscious I become of how quickly everything is moving.

James is ten now, and I genuinely struggle to understand where that time went.

I can still picture him being tiny and doing his first full length of a 25-metre swimming pool. I remember standing there watching him and crying like a dickhead because he had made it all the way to the other end.

Now he is this confident ten-year-old with a wicked sense of humour, asking me what the meaning of life is over dinner and then immediately abandoning philosophy because sticking chopsticks in your mouth is apparently much more entertaining.

That is the bit I do not want to miss.

I do not want to spend so much time looking backwards at things I cannot change or forwards towards things that may never happen that I forget to notice what is happening right in front of me.

Because the ordinary stuff counts as well.

Probably more than we realise.

The Thursday swims. The stupid questions in the car. Getting soaked by a water pistol. A pint afterwards. Noodles. Two kids laughing at something completely ridiculous.

None of those things are massive life events.

There is no photograph of them sitting on somebody’s vision board.

But maybe that is the point.

I think sometimes we treat normal life like it is just the waiting room for something more important.

It is not.

This is the important bit.

I still have no idea what I would have said if James had sat there waiting for my answer. I would probably have overcomplicated it and tried far too hard to sound wise.

Thankfully, he saved me the trouble.

While I was sitting there trying to work out the meaning of life, he had already gone back to living it.

And maybe that is as complicated as it needs to be.

Do not wait for your life to start. It already has.