Her Arm in Mine

I flew home with a plan. She needed something else entirely.

“The trouble with attempting to master your time, it turns out, is that time ends up mastering you.”
— Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

My mother has always been my foundation. So when she grabbed my arm in her doctor’s office lobby, I didn’t realize that she was dizzy from her blood pressure spiking. I thought she was just steadying herself before heading up the stairs. It took me a second to understand that she needed me to support her.

Three weeks earlier, she had spent three days in the hospital from an illness that hit fast and hard. Followed by a month off work while she recovered. I flew home around Memorial Day, and I was stunned by how frail she seemed. Her lungs were weak, and she struggled to walk without stopping to catch her breath. She needed my arm just to cross the room.

Her Turn to Lean

I spent that week home driving her to appointments, sitting in waiting rooms, and taking care of whatever needed to be done. After being released from the hospital, all she wanted was a Dairy Queen Blizzard. Then she wanted one after a follow-up appointment, and also the day after that. If a Blizzard was going to get her through the afternoon, then that was the whole plan.

Somewhere in the middle of those days, I felt something I didn’t expect: gratitude. For the chance to be strong for her, the way she had spent my lifetime being strong for me.

She used to be the one who rearranged her whole life around her children’s needs without being asked. This was one of the few times it ran the other direction. I didn’t plan it. I just showed up, and the days filled themselves with whatever she needed that hour.

Nothing to Search For

I’d read Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks during my sabbatical year when I was learning to pay more attention and choose wonder over worry. I didn’t expect to need what I learned so quickly.

In each waiting room, I found myself reaching for my phone. Not to check work but to search what her numbers meant or to see if what she was feeling was normal.

But nothing I searched was going to tell me what I actually wanted to know: that she would be okay. All I knew for certain was that my mother needed a ride to the next appointment and my arm to hold in the hallway. That was the entire job, and for once, I let that be enough.

The Coordinate: Exhale Stillness

In the ENOUGH Principle, Exhale Stillness means pause before you plan.

Burkeman’s argument is that you cannot master time. The average human life runs about four thousand weeks, and no amount of productivity closes that gap. The only real choice we have is what gets to occupy those weeks. In past weeks, I would treat an open hour like a problem to solve. That week back home, the open hours were the whole point.

Scarcity says use every spare minute or it’s wasted. Sufficiency says the waiting room was the real work. Sitting beside my mother, driving her, and holding her arm whenever she needed it. Stillness wasn’t a break from a meaningful week. It was the biggest part of what made that week special.

My mother is back to work now and growing stronger every week. I’m trying not to let my gratitude fade into the background the way it usually does once a scare passes. Burkeman would say I only have so many weeks left with her, and none of them are guaranteed. I don’t want to spend any of them on autopilot.

A Small Practice

Pick one person you love. This week, keep your phone in another room and give them one hour. No plan or agenda for that hour. Just the time together.

See you next week.

P.S. Who’s held you up for years without being asked, and when did you last get the chance to do that for them?