On being present without being fully there, and what it actually costs to build something new
Last week I walked up Lone Pine with my daughter and our dog. The trail cuts through pines above Kalispell, and it was one of those afternoons where everything is quiet and cold and exactly right.
I was there. But part of me wasn’t.
Part of me was back at the laptop, turning over a problem I hadn’t solved yet. Running through what wasn’t working. Calculating how far behind I was on something I’d told myself would have momentum by now.
This is the cost nobody in the self-employment conversation talks about honestly. Not the financial risk. Not the long hours. Those are easy to romanticize. The harder cost is the mental bandwidth that a new venture takes, the way it follows you onto the trail, into the dinner table, into the quiet moments that are supposed to be just yours.
I want to be careful here because this isn’t a story about neglect. I’ve been self-employed for 26 years. I’ve built real things: a six-figure photography business as well as a six-figure online marketing agency with clients who have trusted me for over a decade. I know how to protect time with my family because I’ve learned the hard way that work will swallow it if you let it.
So I go on the walks. This weekend I walked to get coffee with my wife. We sat across from each other with hot cups in hand and I was grateful for it in a way that felt urgent, because I know how easy it is to let too much time pass before you do that again. Before you know it it’s been too long since I’ve sat across from my wife looking into her eyes with a hot coffee in hand.
But here’s what I’m sitting with.
There’s a difference between being present and being fully there. And when you’re in the costly middle of building something new, when the momentum hasn’t come yet, when the results aren’t matching the effort, when you’re doing it mostly alone, that difference is hard to close. The body shows up. The mind is still at the desk.
What makes it harder is knowing that what I’m trading my mental presence for isn’t even delivering yet. That’s the part that stings. If the venture was thriving, there’d at least be something to show for the cost. But in the early stages of something new, you’re often trading the walk and the coffee and the card game with your daughter for unrealized potential. For the idea of what it might become.
I’ve been thinking about a question someone sent me after last week’s post: what are we storing up?
I don’t think the answer is to stop building. I don’t think it’s to choose family over work in some clean either/or way. I think it’s to be honest about the cost, to name it rather than pretend it isn’t there, and to keep choosing the walk anyway. To sit across from your wife anyway. To be on the trail with your daughter and let the unsolved problem wait for an hour.
Not because the work doesn’t matter. But because some things matter more. And the only way to know the difference is to keep asking the question.
What are we storing up?
If you’re in the middle of building something right now, do you feel this tension? Not guilt. Just the weight of carrying something unfinished into the moments that are supposed to be off the clock.
Reply and tell me what you do with it. I’m genuinely asking because I’m still figuring it out.
