I don’t remember what time it was. It was dark, and I had been awake for hours.
I was standing in the living room of our small Sugarhouse apartment, bouncing up and down with our infant son tucked against my chest. He had colic and was slightly malnourished, though we didn’t know it at the time. He cried constantly, sometimes for hours, and nothing seemed to settle him except the slow, relentless rhythm of being held and moved.
So I bounced.
Back and forth across the living room. Sweat running down my back. Legs aching. Arms trembling from holding the same position too long. He would fall asleep eventually, and when he did, I had a system: I’d sit on the couch, support my arms with pillows, and angle my body just enough to doze off while still holding him. It wasn’t comfortable. It wasn’t easy. But it worked.
And I could make it work night after night.
My wife and I were both working full time. I was still in school. Life was more pressure than margin back then. But I remember feeling something close to proud in those moments. Not because I was doing something heroic. Just because I knew my wife could sleep. That mattered to me. If she could sleep, even for a few hours, I could endure the rest.
For the first four months of our son’s life, we didn’t realize he wasn’t getting enough to eat. My wife was trying to nurse, and we assumed, naively, that things were going as they should. He was small. Too small, in hindsight. But we were new parents, doing our best.
When we finally started supplementing with formula, his body responded quickly. Our skinny, often inconsolable baby began to fill out. He slept more. Cried less. Caught up. And today, at 22 years old and six foot three, he’s doing just fine. But I sometimes look back on those early nights with a strange kind of tenderness.
Because I didn’t know it at the time, but that was the beginning of learning how many truly important things in life are also quiet.
There was no applause. No measuring stick. No one saw the hours I spent bouncing on tired legs in the dark. I wasn’t building a resume or crossing off a to-do list. I was just holding my son and hoping he’d sleep.
And somehow, that’s still one of the most meaningful things I’ve ever done.
We don’t often talk about the things that live in silence.
We talk about achievement, momentum, and ambition. We notice the loud things. But some of the moments that shape us most don’t make noise. They don’t draw attention. They’re just there in the corner of a dimly lit room, while the rest of the world sleeps.
Back then, one of my superpowers was functioning on very little sleep. That season didn’t last, but I’m grateful for it now. Not just because it got me through, but because I think I needed to learn that there is strength in stillness, too. Strength in presence. Strength in showing up for someone else with nothing to prove.
The world is so loud now, favoring volume, certainty, and acceleration.
But some of the most essential things, the ones that matter long after the moment has passed, happen in quiet repetition. In patience. In sweat and silence and unnoticed love.
That season with my oldest son taught me that being tired doesn’t mean you’re failing. That holding someone through the night is enough. That doing the same thing for the hundredth time without recognition still counts. It all adds up, even if no one’s keeping score.
Especially if no one’s keeping score.
These days, my life is louder. Busier. Full of projects and deadlines and people who count on me in different ways. But I still come back to that apartment. To that living room. To that exhausted, twenty-something version of me bouncing a fussy baby until sweat ran down my face, and then figuring out how to fall asleep without dropping him.
That wasn’t ambition. That wasn’t strategy.
That was love. And it was enough.
Sometimes, we look for meaning in big breakthroughs or public wins. But I’ve learned that what’s truly important is often quieter than we expect. It’s what happens when no one’s looking. It’s the care you give that no one applauds. The faithfulness that never makes it into a photo album or gets posted online.
That kind of quiet can feel invisible at times. But I’ve come to believe it’s where most of the good things in life begin.
The bouncing. The waiting. The holding. The choice to stay.
It doesn’t need to be loud to matter.
And that is enough.
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