Welcome to the Daily Dad podcast where we provide one lesson every day to help you

with your most important job being a dad. These are lessons inspired by ancient philosophy,

by practical wisdom, and insights from dads all over the world. Thank you for

listening, and we hope this helps. They don't understand time. Do you? Think about where you

were 15 years ago, 20. Think about just how long ago that was.

Now think about your thoughts from 15 years ago. Maybe that takes you back too far, but even that is

illustrative. When we were younger, we had a very limited conception of time because we hadn't

experienced much of it. When you started high school,

the idea of going every day to this place over the next four years seemed like an eternity.

Four years was at that point in your existence almost a third of the time you'd been alive.

But then when you started college, four years was not quite such a long stretch because you'd just

done a similar bid it didn't constitute such a disproportionate block of your time on the planet

less than a quarter at this point and then by the time you had your first kid however many

years later when people started saying just wait until they start kindergarten,

four years was just a blip to you. As we age, the shape of time changes, especially if you're

the parent of school-age kids. Every parent will at some point hear these words from a parent who's

been through it. Days are long, but years are short. Indeed, the sort of time you can't keep on your watch

seems to speed up. One week, one month, one year, the measures of time are no longer so consequential

because we've been through so many of them before. We've spent weeks on a project or at the in-laws

waiting for something to be shipped. We've endured a bad job for longer than we should have.

We can count how many years it's been since high school or college in multiples of five.

It's a tricky thing, though, time, because as we age, we get more comfortable with it,

...