Welcome to the Daily Dad podcast, where we provide one lesson every single day to help you with your most important job, being a parent.

I'm Ryan Holiday, and I draw these lessons from ancient philosophy, modern psychology, practical wisdom, and insights from

parents just like you all over the world. Thank you for listening, and we hope this helps.

Can you do this? There's so much to do. There's so much going on. We have so much to manage. We have so much coming up.

And it all becomes like a blur, the big moments, and the small ones, one task from the next, one day to the next.

There is a beautiful passage in Claire Keegan's small things like these where the husband furlong catches himself like we all do

simply going through the motions. Even while he'd be creaming the butter and sugar, it says,

his mind was not so much upon the here and now and on this Sunday nearing Christmas with his

wife and daughter so much as on tomorrow and who owed what

and how and when he'd deliver what was ordered and what man he'd leave to which tasks and how and

where he'd collect what was owed and before tomorrow was coming to an end he knew his mind would

already be working much in the same way yet again over the day that was to follow. Even on Christmas, even at their

birthday, we do it, even after that health scare. We said before that the key to parenting is

presence, not presence, but presence, E, and C, E. What an incredible gift that would be to give to our children. You know, to

actually be there when we made cookies for them, to be there when they open the presents that we gave

them, to actually be there as we sat in the audience of that performance, to actually be there

as we sat on the couch and watched a movie

instead of thinking of the next thing, instead of worrying, instead of planning.

What if we were just here right now with them? Hey, thanks for listening to the Daily Dad podcast.

You can get this via email every day as well at Daily Dad.com.

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