I went swimming with my dad last week.
We go every couple of weeks now. It started as a way to find something normal… something that wasn't grief, wasn't work, wasn't the constant noise of trying to hold everything together. Just two blokes in a pool, doing lengths, not saying much. Essentially we were just finding commonality amongst the chaos that is grief.
It's become one of my favourite things.
We don't talk about anything profound. We don't process. We just swim, go to the sauna, and then have a chat in the car park and go our own ways. It's the closest thing I have to a ritual right now.
As we left last week, my dad said something to me: "Try to just enjoy it all. Enjoy them now."
He meant the girls. He meant the chaos. He meant all of it.
And I've heard this before. Everyone says it. "They grow up so fast." "You'll miss this." People have been telling me some version of that since the twins were born. I'd nod and smile and internally think, “mate, you haven't seen the morning and night routine.”
But this time it landed differently.
Maybe because of everything that's happened this year.
When you lose someone, time changes shape. You stop seeing it as this endless thing stretching out ahead of you and start noticing how thin it actually is. How quickly a phase becomes a memory. How a person who was just there, every Sunday, every birthday, every phone call you nearly didn't make, is suddenly not.
And it makes you look at everything else differently.
The nightly 2:47am wake-up where both girls are crying and no one's slept properly and the house looks like it's been ransacked… I know, intellectually, that I'll miss that one day. That sounds mad, but I will.
I'll miss the weight of a kid on my chest who won't let me put her down. I'll miss the 20 min negotiations. I'll miss being needed in that desperate, irrational, all-consuming way that only small children need you.
Because one day they won't need me like that. One day the mornings will be quiet, and I'll sit there with my coffee in a clean kitchen and think about the chaos, and I'll want it back.
My dad knows this. He's living it.
He's watching his son rush through the years the same way he probably rushed through his. And he's trying to tell me, gently, in a car park, after an hour and a half swim, that the rushing is the thing you regret.
Not the failures, not the missed deals, and not the stuff that kept you up at night.
The rushing.
I've spent the last 8 months in survival mode. Building. Grieving. Holding things together. And somewhere inside that, I'd started treating the present like an obstacle between me and the future I'm working towards. The girls' bedtime was something to get through so I could work. The morning routine was something to endure so I could get to my desk.
And that's not wrong, exactly. You have to keep moving. You have to build. But if you're not careful, you optimise your way out of the thing you're building it all for.
The takeaway:
I don't think "live in the present" is the right framing. It's too clean, too…Instagram. The reality is messier than that, you can't just decide to be present and suddenly the 4am wake-up feels like a gift.
But you can notice it. You can catch yourself mid-rush and think: this is the bit. This is the part I'll want back.
My dad didn't give me a philosophy. He gave me a mirror. And what I saw was a man so focused on building the future that he was sleepwalking through the thing that makes the future worth building for.
I'm not saying I've fixed that, I haven't. But I heard him.
And this morning, when both girls got into bed with me before I'd even properly woke up, I didn't reach for my phone, I just laid there looking at them both.
It won't last. Tomorrow I'll probably be back to rushing. But for a minute, I was exactly where I was supposed to be.
See you next week.
— Antonio