On the Slowness of Certain Hours

Some evenings stretch out like a long exhale.

You know the ones. The bath is done, pajamas are on, teeth mostly brushed. No one’s crying, but no one’s exactly cooperating either. The clock says 7:42, which somehow feels like it should be 9:15, and the younger one is slowly—slowly—lining up plastic animals along the armrest of the couch, narrating a story only he fully understands.

It’s the kind of hour where nothing really happens. And yet it demands everything.

There’s no crisis. No lesson to teach. No magic. Just the quiet rhythm of nighttime closing in—shapes softening, the air cooling. I sit there, half-watching, half-drifting, my mind tugged by a dozen small threads: Did I sign that permission slip? What’s for lunch tomorrow? Should I have handled that meeting differently?

But the animals keep lining up. One by one.

There’s a slowness to parenting that doesn’t get mentioned in the books. Not the chaos—that part everyone talks about. But the long, stretched-out minutes where you’re just... there. Waiting for a child to finish telling a story that loops in on itself. Sitting on the floor beside a half-built Lego spaceship while they decide whether it needs wings or a tail. Watching them fall asleep with their hand in yours, the seconds ticking by like raindrops.

Nothing seems to happen in those moments. But I think that’s where life quietly builds.

We spend so much of our lives rushing toward the next thing. The next milestone. The next task. The next version of ourselves that might feel more in control. But then a slow hour comes along and asks nothing of you but your presence. And you realize how hard that can be.

To sit still. To listen. To resist the itch to check your phone or stand up or move things along.

I’m not good at it yet. I still catch myself half-here. I still want to fast-forward through the parts where I feel useless or bored or fidgety. But every so often, I manage to stay in it. I breathe. I nod along to the story. I help the zebra find his spot in the line.

And in those slow hours, something shifts. The world doesn’t seem to need me to be anything more than what I am: a dad, on a couch, with time to spare.

Where does the time go when nothing seems to happen?

Maybe it goes into the quiet places—the ones that hold us steady. The ones we don’t remember day by day, but that shape us all the same.