Excerpt from a diary I kept in a shoebox under my bed, dated April 3, 1999:
“Today I tried to hammer a nail into the bench behind the garage but it bent and I bent it again and now it’s a curve like a fish. I showed it to Dad and he said, ‘Sometimes things bend before they hold.’ I don’t know if that’s good or bad. Mom laughed when I said I’ll build my own desk. She thinks I won’t. I think I will.”
—
I was ten when I decided I would stop asking for help.
Not in a grand, dramatic way. There was no big speech or slammed door, no declaration of independence scribbled on loose-leaf paper.
It happened quietly. Like most decisions that change you do.
I had been building something behind the garage.
A desk, I think. Or maybe it was a fort.
The details blur. What I remember is the feeling: the ache of trying to make something real with your own hands, without the neatness of instruction manuals or adult interference.
I was hammering nails into splintered wood I’d scavenged from the back lot. They kept bending. One after the other, a soft curl under too much force. I remember feeling embarrassed. I hadn’t yet learned that failure makes noise.
My father was watching.
Not looming, not lecturing. Just there. Drinking coffee in the background, like he had agreed not to intervene unless blood was involved.
When I showed him the bent nail, he looked at it like it was a good question. Then he said something that didn’t quite land until decades later:
“Sometimes things bend before they hold.”
At the time, I thought he was just trying to make me feel better.
Now I think he was telling me something harder.
That force without timing doesn’t work.
That pushing too soon makes even strong things useless.
That knowing when not to act is sometimes more important than how hard you try.
—
Not Every Battle Needs to Be Fought
I think a lot about that lesson now—how much I misunderstood it.
How I carried the idea that “never asking for help” was strength.
That “showing up” meant “showing force.”
That precision was something you practiced alone.
But real precision—like real timing—comes from listening.
To the resistance of the wood.
To the sound a nail makes just before it bends.
To the moments when silence holds more strength than strategy.
When I was older, I read a lesson in a book I won’t name here—
a lesson that said the timing of action is everything.
That hesitation can be fatal.
That once you decide to strike, you must strike.
But I don’t fully agree.
Because sometimes not striking is what keeps the structure standing.
Sometimes choosing not to act is the hardest thing.
And sometimes, what looks like hesitation is really something deeper—
a kind of reverence.
The wisdom to let things settle before you move.
—
Wabi-Sabi in the Missed Hit
I still build things with my hands sometimes. Not desks.
Mostly meals. Letters.
Small systems that hold larger emotions.
And I still bend nails from time to time.
Emotionally, if not literally.
I still try too hard before I listen.
I still jump into moments I should’ve sat with.
But I return, again and again, to that crooked nail behind the garage.
To my father’s voice, soft and half-distracted,
not trying to teach—just observing.
And I remember:
– Not all mistakes are failures. Some are warnings whispered in splinters.
– Timing isn’t about speed. It’s about alignment.
– Force is only elegant when it listens first.
– There’s more courage in waiting than in rushing forward without rhythm.
—
Another diary excerpt from that same week, April 6, 1999:
“Dad asked if I wanted help with the desk. I said no. I meant yes. But I didn’t want him to fix it. I just wanted him to see it was mine.”
—
That’s what it was.
I didn’t need him to do it for me.
I just needed to feel like the act of trying mattered.
And maybe that’s what precision really is.
Not a perfect hit.
Not flawless motion.
But presence.
Patience.
The moment you almost act, but don’t—
because you’re listening.
And something inside tells you:
not yet.
Not now.
Let the nail wait.
Let the silence teach you
when to hold,
and when, finally,
to strike.
life 
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