Last week was full at every edge.
Clinic was overbooked. The medical students had finals, with extra duties in the learning community on top of the clinical load. And we are in the middle of launching a clinical expansion that is the kind of project that does not follow you home in your car — I walk home, and that walk is one of the things that keeps me intact — but follows you to bed. My phone is the first thing I look at in the morning and the last thing I look at at night, and the laptop comes to bed with me more nights than I would like to admit.
The family was flying in for the weekend. Our son and his family, including our six-month-old grandson. Our daughter and her husband, with their two-month-old. My partner's sister and our niece. A full house, three generations, two babies, one weekend. I had been thinking about it all week.
I cooked hibachi on the Blackstone. The babies watched from their parents' hips while I worked the griddle. The food was good. Everyone ate. I looked around the table at a family that has grown and changed shape over the years and thought what I think every time we get one of these weekends — that the constant in all of this is the value of time together, and that nothing else I do during the week buys back the hours we get to spend like this.
And then dinner ended. I sat down on the couch.
And I fell asleep.
Not the polite drift of a man winding down. Actually asleep. The evening I had been looking forward to for two weeks, with the people I most wanted to spend it with, and I could not stay awake for it.
I was not sad about this in the moment, because I was not awake for the moment. I was sad about it the next morning, when I realized the account that powers being present with the people you love — which is its own account, separate from the one that lets you stand at a griddle — was empty before I sat down.
The account you most need to be full on Saturday is not the one you spend during the week.
Here is the thing I tell clients in coaching that I had not yet told myself: the account you most need to be full on Saturday is not the one you spend during the week. Clinical work and administrative work and launching a service line drain the physical and cognitive reserves. The account you need for the family weekend is a different account, and nothing about getting through the week refills it. The harder the week, the more depleted that account gets, because you spend the week putting it on hold and telling yourself you'll catch up on Saturday.
You don't catch up. You fall asleep on the couch.
If you are a physician reading this, the odds you have done some version of the same thing this month are high. The Saturday dinner. The afternoon at the lake you slept through. The kid's game where you were physically there and mentally somewhere else. We are extraordinarily well-trained to drain the wrong account and then stand at our own family table with nothing left for it.
What I did not do — and want to do better — is notice it on Wednesday, when there was still time to protect Saturday. The walk home is a start. Phone in another room before bed is a start. Laptop staying on the desk is a start. None of these are heroic. They are the small structural moves that decide whether you fall asleep on the couch or stay up at the table.
The family is coming back this summer. I'd like to be awake when they do.
If you want the framework I use with clients on this — the three energy accounts and how to read your own pattern — I wrote about it on the blog last week. Read it here →
— Ben
P.S. Tell me about the Saturday you slept through. Or the one you protected.
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