Undiluted

Keep showing up. For your family, for your team, for yourself — but most of all for the few people whose whole lives are happening right next to yours while you are half-looking at a screen.

Be there for your wife. All the way there, not in the room while your mind is three problems away. Be present for your daughter — actually present, so she is talking to you and not to a man nodding on autopilot. Listen to your son when he tells you something, the whole way through, like it matters, because to him it does, and because the window in which he wants to tell you anything at all is smaller than you think.

Half-presence robs you of them.

The people you love are only fully available to a man who fully shows up. Give them half your attention and you do not get half of them — you get a thinned-out version, a fragment, the parts that survive being half-heard. The real depth of who they are, the thing you would have to be fully there to catch, passes right by you unnoticed. You were physically present for a life you were mentally absent from, and you called it being there.

That is a watered-down life. Same glass, same hours, all the flavor diluted out because you could not be bothered to be all the way in the room you were standing in.

Life is nothing but a string of experiences, and the richest ones are not scenery — they are people, and they only pour full-strength for a man who is paying full attention. Water that down with partial presence and you drink your whole life at half its taste, and then wonder, at the end, why so little of it seemed to have flavor.

So do not water it down.

Put the thing down. Look up. Be all the way in the room.

Drink it undiluted, while the people in the glass are still here to be tasted.

"Wherever you are, be all there." — Jim Elliot