You're Not Behind. You're Becoming.

 

Photo by Josie Weiss on Unsplash

Starting my own business has left me in this perpetual thought-state: You should be further along by now.

Every technical problem I solve, I wonder why I can’t get it done faster. I built an ETL pipeline for a client that was supposed to take hours and instead it took days. Everywhere I turned, there was a new data nuance I had to address.

That thought, though—you should be further along—is really everywhere in my life: my work, health, writing, and parenting. It’s the annoying, inaccurate, persistent voice that’s always reminding me where I should be, what milestones I should have hit, and how much I should have accomplished.

The idea of “should” always comes back to comparison. Someone else’s path. Someone else’s timing. Someone else’s life.

When I was younger, I thought about it in terms of being a “late bloomer.” My friends hit growth spurts before I did. Their voices dropped sooner. They could grow some facial hair while I could barely manage peach fuzz. I got teased plenty for it. Back then, I thought I was behind. But then I outgrew most of them, and by the time high school choir rolled around, I was the second-lowest bass in the room. My body had caught up. It just took its time.

That pattern has repeated itself in other ways. At the piano bench, I was decent, but never as good as my older brother. He was the anomaly — the star basketball player who could also sit down and rip through the Khachaturian toccata. I told myself I was behind, even when what was really happening was slower, quieter becoming.

The world has a way of reinforcing the idea of “behind.” We attach labels and timelines to everything: careers, families, education, even hobbies. By 30 you should have this. By 40 you should know that. By 50 you should have it figured out. Social media and the internet make it so much worse. Scroll long enough and you’ll find someone younger, faster, more accomplished, more certain.

I started, a long time ago, to realize that becoming doesn’t run on clocks. But, it’s easier to forget than remember that.

Some of the best things in my life happened later than I thought they would. My work. My writing. Even some relationships. Often, the people we love most and the things we care about don’t arrive on schedule. They unfold almost like they have their own agenda.

A few days ago, I was warming up some meatballs in the microwave. Like usual, I got lost in thought as the seconds disappeared on the timer. Then, the microwave beeped, pulling me out of my thoughts and into the present. My meatballs were ready.

I stood there, looking around my kitchen, in our house that’s starting to fall apart, and I realized: I’m not behind. I’m just still becoming.

That doesn’t erase the urgency that presses in. There are still bills to pay, weeds to pull, deadlines to hit. There’s still the pressure of should whispering in my ear. But then there are the moments that remind me growth is not a race.

Folding laundry, laughing with my kids, and eating meatballs with Chic-Fil-A sauce at the counter don’t look like progress. But they are part of becoming.

We all reach the ultimate “finish line” at some point in our lives, but the rest of life doesn’t need to be measured like some line you either reach on time or miss forever. Life is a long unfolding; a slower kind of growth that doesn’t care how anyone else is measuring.

And when I pause long enough to see it, even in something as small as standing at the microwave, I can believe it:

I’m not behind. I’m becoming.

And that is enough.

Thanks for reading, and before you go. . .

I’m Aaron Pace. I write from the middle of things — life, business, fatherhood, faith, and the slow work of becoming someone I can live with. Not as an expert, but as someone trying to pay attention.

If this piece resonated with you, I’d be honored if you followed along here on Medium. I write — not because I’ve arrived, but because I’m finally moving again.

If any of this resonates with you, I wrote a book you might appreciate.
It’s called You Don’t Have to Escape to Be Free — a collection of my reflections on identity, meaning, and building a life I don’t want to run away from.

You can check it out here:

Aaron Pace on Books.by

What if the life you're trying to escape from is the very one you're meant to live? You Don't Have to Escape to Be Free…

books.by

Trying to Let the Day Be Enough

 

Photo by Greg Jenkins on Unsplash

I was standing at the kitchen sink, scraping cheese off a plate. I think my youngest made nachos or something. There’s a thought that runs through my head with all the craze of a streaker at a football game: I should be working on something else.

Okay, maybe the thought isn’t quite so dramatic as the way I portrayed it, but it is persistent. It hums there everyday in my already over-busy brain. There were emails in my inbox, projects waiting, bills on the counter, weeds in the yard. Washing dishes didn’t feel like progress. It felt like stalling. It probably is stalling. My mind kept wandering toward tomorrow, and the day after, as if the simple act of getting cheese off a plate wasn’t enough to justify the time.

That’s when a phrase from the Gospel of Matthew came to mind: “Be not therefore anxious for the morrow: for the morrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”

I’ve never been entirely sure what that last line means. But when I hear it, I think of endurance but also paying attention to what’s right in front of you. Don’t spend the day trying to outrun tomorrow.

For me, that’s not easy. Maybe it’s not easy for any of us.

The world makes it almost impossible. Notifications don’t stop. News cycles reset every hour. Work asks for just a little more — always a little more. Even at home, the unfinished chores trail behind like persistent shadows. Every spare moment tries to slip into planning, calculating, worrying.

And yet, the minutes keep passing whether I fill them with worry or not.

I notice this most on Friday nights with my youngest son. For nearly six years, we’ve had what we call Party Night. Ninety minutes carved out for just the two of us, doing whatever he wants. Basketball in the basement because a windstorm ruined both of our outside hoops. Making “Animal Talk” videos for his small but loyal YouTube following. Competing in GeoGuessr, clicking around satellite maps trying to guess where in the world we’ve landed. Sometimes just talking.

When we started, he was four years old. Now he’s ten. In the meantime, two of his older siblings have already moved out. Another is getting ready to leave for college. The time feels different now. Minutes somehow don’t hold as much as they used to. I joke with myself that a minute has only 37 seconds these days. Something has sped up, though the clocks still insist on sixty ticks.

The screens don’t help. The digital fog gets thicker every year, pulling attention in a thousand directions at once. As I sit here, five different screens glow around me. Five. Each one with its own reasons to demand attention, its own small urgencies. The constant switching erases things I want to remember. I sometimes wonder if our brains were ever built for this.

Which is why the phrase lingers with me: Sufficient unto the day.

Maybe it means the day already has enough to hold. Enough trouble. Enough joy. Enough work and enough rest. Maybe it’s less about squeezing something extraordinary into every twenty-four hours, and more about noticing the ordinary things that already fill it.

Like folding laundry.

Like rinsing a plate.

Like listening to your child explain why their YouTube channel deserves more subscribers or the new D&D-themed videos he’s exploring.

These are the hours that repeat. They don’t always look impressive. They don’t post well on social media. They vanish from memory almost as quickly as they happen. But they are what a life is made of.

For a long time, I thought I needed to fight that. That real life was somewhere just ahead, waiting for me if I worked fast enough, dreamed big enough, chased hard enough. But the longer I live, the more I think real life is here already. In the basket of clean laundry. In the driveway weeds. In the sound of my youngest daughter coming home at 1:30 am on a Sunday morning after babysitting my sister’s kids.

The voice in my head still argues. This isn’t enough. You should be doing more. You’re wasting time. But when I hold the plate in my hands, scrub away a bit of cheese, and put it in the dishwasher, another thought rises: This is the work too.

Not every day is transformative. Not every hour leads to growth. Some days are just days. And letting them be days — showing up, paying attention, washing dishes, folding laundry, laughing with your son — is the work.

It may not look like much. But when I step back, I can see it’s shaping me anyway.

And that is enough.

Life Is What Repeats

 

Photo by Keagan Henman on Unsplash

I was bent over in the yard with my shovel in my hands, prying a thistle out of the grass, when the thought came to me: Didn’t I just do this?

The roots of thistles always run deep before the plant has hardly broken the surface. I pushed the shovel into the rocky West Jordan soil, twisted, then pulled. There’s no saving the grass around a thistle. If you want it gone, some grass and dirt are necessary casualties to get rid of the noxious plant.

I felt like I cleared the same spot of lawn last week. And what seemed like the week before that. And the week before that.

Thistles are persistent. It seems that no matter how often I dig them out, they figure out how to come back, mocking the momentary sense of accomplishment.

I don’t like yardwork. It’s one of those things I rush through as fast as I can just to get it over with. Close enough is good enough — except that’s what leaves space for the weeds to come back faster.

Yesterday, I’d just come back from a run when I set to work in the yard. Maybe it was because I was tired from the run that I lingered just a little longer, leaning on my shovel with a large bucket of weeds by my side.

The narrative that usually plays in my brain about yardwork echoes the words of Mr. Incredible from The Incredibles: Didn’t I just fix this? Why can’t it stay fixed for a little while? And my own thoughts: This is wasted time. Shouldn’t I be working on something more important?

Life, it turns out, is mostly this. Repetition.

The yard work. The dishes stacked in the sink again. The laundry that just can’t seem to fold itself. The commute that blurs into one long stretch of stoplights and podcast chatter. These are the hours that fill a life, even if they vanish from memory the minute they’re done.

The natural tendency is to measure progress by things that break this cycle — the trips, the wins, the rare moments that stick out, that are noticed by others. But those things are such thin slices of time. The real shape and color of most days is carried by what repeats, not what stands out. The thistles that keep coming back. The phone calls. The meetings. The hum of family “doing their thing” around the house or the quiet when all the kids are gone. The little rituals that almost feel invisible while you’re in them.

So often, those things feel like a burden. They’re just one more thing to do. I walk past the basketball hoop that fell over months ago in a strong wind, still mostly hidden beside the tool shed that I need to haul away.

Just one more thing.

I’m beginning to wonder, though, if maybe the repetition is the whole point.

There’s a certain beauty in pulling a weed and seeing bare soil left behind, even knowing another weed will probably grow there by two weeks from Saturday. There’s satisfaction in mowing the grass, even when you know it will need cutting again in a week. Like folding clothes, like cooking dinner, like showing up at the office — these tasks don’t stay done. They ask for you again and again.

The brain doesn’t always cooperate. It whispers: This doesn’t count. Move faster. Find something new. It’s an impatient voice. It forgets that the person I’m becoming is formed not in the highlights, but in the slow sculpting of repetition. Like water shaping stone, the ordinary tasks wear down my rough edges, teaching me persistence and care.

Life is what repeats.

The thistles will always be there. And the laundry. And the endless work waiting for its turn. But so will the chance to notice. To feel the shovel push into the ground. To watch the soil break. To let the moment be enough without rushing past it.

And that is enough.

The Fear Hustle Won't Fix

 

Photo by Jonas Svidras on Unsplash

12:49 a.m.

I could hardly focus my eyes. I’d been sitting at my desk since 4:45 the previous morning — more than twenty hours of nearly continuous coding. The last two hours had been spent staring at the same stubborn section of code, trying to figure out why the report wouldn’t load. No linter errors. No console issues. Nothing visibly broken — just a refusal to function.

I’d combed through every line, refreshed everything, and even restarted the server out of desperation. The interface wouldn’t crash. It just wouldn’t work. I was starting to question whether I was even looking in the right place. And then, at 12:52 a.m., I saw it — a single missing letter. I’d meant to write an asynchronous call but forgot the “a.” Perfectly valid syntax either way, just not the behavior I needed. I fixed the typo, saved the file, and reloaded the page. It worked instantly.

The technical failure was minuscule. The emotional aftermath? Yeah, not so much.

It’s strange how something as small as a letter can feel like a referendum on your competence. I’ve written thousands of lines of code that work beautifully (or at least work). I’ve solved problems that genuinely make my clients’ lives easier. I’ve hired eight people in the last two weeks. People are paying me real money to build real tools that serve real businesses. But all it takes is one bug — especially one caused by something I should have seen — to make me feel like I’ve tricked everyone. Like I’m one bug away from being exposed.

I’ve built this company from scratch. I’ve architected systems and delivered work I’m proud of. And yet, more nights than not, I wrestle with the fear that I’m not actually qualified to be here. That if anyone looked too closely, they’d realize I’m just making it up as I go. That I’ve built a Potemkin village of functioning interfaces and structured codebases that could collapse if someone leaned too hard on the facade.

It’s not that the work is fake. It’s just that the fear doesn’t care.

That night, long after the system was fixed and the screen stopped glowing, I found myself laying in the dark asking questions I usually outrun with more work.

Why do I keep pushing myself this hard?

Why am I still at my computer after midnight again?

Why do I feel like every mistake is a threat, not just a glitch?

The answer, if I’m being honest, is fear.

Fear of being seen as unqualified.

Fear of letting a client down.

Fear of building something that only looks right from a distance.

And so I hustle. Not just because there’s work to do — but because the motion keeps me from hearing that voice. The one that doubts. The one that wants proof, not progress.

But the hustle doesn’t fix it. It just buries it. Until the next missed letter brings it roaring back.

I’ve started noticing that the harder I work to prove I’m enough, the less I actually believe it. (How’s that for ironic?) The busier I stay, the more that doubt festers beneath the surface. It’s as if I think enough hours, enough output, enough usefulness will silence the fear. But fear isn’t quieted by accomplishment. It’s quieted by presence. By naming what’s really going on underneath the performance.

The funny thing is, my clients aren’t asking me to be perfect. They don’t know about the typo, or the two hours it stole from me. All they know is that the report works, the tool does its job, and their lives are easier because of it. The pressure to be flawless doesn’t come from them.

It comes from me.

Most days, I feel like a fraud. Days when the tech stack overwhelms me, or a small mistake costs me more time than I care to admit. But I’m learning to see those moments not as signs of failure, but as reminders. Not of what I lack — but of what I’ve survived. What I’ve learned. What I’m still building.

The typo is fixed. The code works now. The night eventually ended. But the question lingers — what are you really afraid of?

And the answer, more and more, is this: I’m afraid that if I stop, it’ll all fall apart. But maybe the opposite is true. Maybe if I stop — even briefly — I’ll see that it’s already standing.

Maybe I don’t have to hustle so hard to belong.

Maybe I already do.

And that is enough.

Thanks for reading, and before you go. . .

I’m Aaron Pace. I write from the middle of things — life, business, fatherhood, faith, and the slow work of becoming someone I can live with. Not as an expert, but as someone trying to pay attention.

If this piece resonated with you, I’d be honored if you followed along here on Medium. I write — not because I’ve arrived, but because I’m finally moving again.

Rebuilding Without a Blueprint

 

Photo by Plufow Le Studio on Unsplash

One morning, I was waiting in the car for my youngest daughter — who, true to form, was running late — while she filled up her water bottle before school.

It was the same ritual we’d been through a hundred times: keys jangling, door slamming, traffic rolling by. Nothing memorable. I sat there with the engine running, radio off, scrolling through something on my phone I didn’t care about.

And for some reason, I thought of the laptop.
Not mine.
My mother-in-law’s.
And not a laptop, in that moment — just a pile of its insides, scattered in an almost frantic arc across the floor of my brother-in-law’s bedroom.

He was thirteen.

I found him sitting cross-legged on the carpet, the machine entirely dismantled around him.

Tiny screws in a mostly organized pile. All the pieces — some of them never meant to be pulled apart after the factory line — were laid out like a puzzle that had no picture on the box.

He looked up and froze. His face held that unmistakable panic of a kid who knows he’s gone too far.

He must have thought I was one of his parents when I opened the door. And if I had been, he probably would’ve been grounded into the next year.

But it was just me, and relief settled in.

We walked upstairs for dinner and told the rest of the family we were “working on something.”

We didn’t say what it was. We just ate fast, then excused ourselves to go back to our project.

I’ve built computers before. Taken apart my fair share of laptops and put them back together in working order. But what I saw on that floor was something else entirely.

He’d gone deeper than necessary. Disconnected things that shouldn’t be disconnected. Removed components just to see what was underneath.

And now, there we were: no manual, no YouTube tutorial, no step-by-step guide.

Just a kid with a scattered machine, and a guy with a working knowledge I hoped would be enough.

So we sat. Side-by-side on the carpet, in the mess. Reconnecting, refitting, retracing steps.

At one point, we closed the bottom cover — proud of ourselves — only to realize we’d forgotten to reconnect the screen’s ribbon cable to the motherboard.

So we opened it back up.

I think about that night a lot. It actually surprises me how many times I’ve gone back to it.

Not because the laptop worked in the end (it did).

And not because we had three leftover screws that never found their home (we did).

But because that night taught me something I didn’t have language for back then:

Sometimes the rebuild matters more than the plan.

Sometimes you don’t need a blueprint.

You just need to stay in the room with someone and keep going.

Life gets dismantled sometimes.

Careers stall. Marriages fray. Friendships fall apart. Bodies break down. Dreams you’ve carried for years get interrupted, rearranged, or quietly die when you weren’t paying attention.

And most of the time, you don’t get a map for how to put it all back together.

You just sit with the scattered parts of whatever used to be — and start. With no tutorials and no neat timeline. Just presence, patience, and maybe someone beside you who isn’t there to shame the mess.

I wonder sometimes if my brother-in-law would’ve kept his passion for building computers if that night had gone differently.

If the panic had been met with yelling.

If someone had grounded him before he got the chance to rebuild.

If shame had replaced curiosity.

He’s got one of the nicest custom gaming setups I’ve ever seen now.

And I don’t take credit for that.

But I do wonder if that night gave him the courage to try again. If it showed him that taking something apart — even too far — isn’t the end of the story. If it helped him learn that failure isn’t permanent. That rebuilding isn’t always a punishment.

Sometimes, it’s a partnership.

There are parts of my own life I’m still trying to rebuild.

Things I pulled apart — sometimes recklessly, sometimes because I didn’t know what else to do. And now I’m sitting in the aftermath, trying to remember what went where. What connected to what. What can still work, even if it’s not perfect anymore.

No blueprint, and no guarantees.

Just an engine idling in the driveway and a memory that reminds me: rebuilding is slow, often clumsy, and always worth it.

Not everything will go back the way it was. Some screws might never find their place. Some corners might never quite fit like they used to.

But that doesn’t mean it’s broken.

It just means you’re rebuilding.

And that is enough.

Thanks for reading, and before you go. . .

I’m Aaron Pace. I write from the middle of things — life, business, fatherhood, faith, and the slow work of becoming someone I can live with. Not as an expert, but as someone trying to pay attention.

If this piece resonated with you, I’d be honored if you followed along here on Medium. I write — not because I’ve arrived, but because I’m finally moving again.