On Saturday, my son spent forty minutes building a tower of wooden blocks. It reached his chin. Then his sister walked past, the tower fell, and I braced myself for tears.
Instead, he laughed, sat back down and started again, a little wider at the base this time.
I think about that tower a lot. About how often I treat a setback as a verdict, when he treated it as information. About how he never asked how long it would take.
Children are not patient because they are calm. They are patient because they are curious. The tower was never the point. Building it was.
I have started building more slowly too: the weekend, the dinner, this notebook. It falls down sometimes. We start again, a little wider at the base.
