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There are so many things to do in a day and, as I get older, they only pile up. We all know that feeling that comes from being an adult. Whether it’s oil changes, store returns, school pick ups, or predetermined engagements, we’re all running from one place to another.

I have days like this. Rushing to get up and rushing out the door, all so we can rush to an appointment. Time is speeding up. My rebuilt heart is racing. I get out of the Jeep, head to the backseat, and prepare to unbuckle my 14-year-old nonverbal son, Lucas.

And there he is…shoeless, sockless, and leaning all the way back because he doesn’t want to get out.

My son doesn’t understand time constraints or frantic begging. In fact, the bigger deal you make out of something, the more likely he is to push in the opposite direction. I don’t want to say where he gets that from, but it’s not me.

The shoes are usually easy to recover, but the socks hide in the folds of the seats like Honey I Shrunk The Kids. It’s then that I finally do it.

I stop.

All morning, we had been going one hundred miles per hour. In one shoeless protest, my son has brought us all to a grinding halt.

Lucas…socks? Where are your socks?

Leaning backwards, contorted and twisted, he keeps eye contact. His fists are balled up next to his head as if he was caught mid-stretch. But we both know, he wasn’t stretching.

Suddenly, that thing we had to get to, the obligation that we couldn’t possibly be more than a minute late for, is on hold. The event that needed our extreme punctuality all of a sudden doesn’t.

That’s just me. I like to be on time. Well, more than “like to.” I need to be. I have nightmares about being stranded when needing to keep an appointment. It’s a real thing. Because of that, I go out of my way to be everywhere on time. I was doing a good job of it too until Shoeless Joe Jackson over here made me lose the World Series.

The trick to getting Lucas shoed up and out of the car isn’t to push him to hurry up. He doesn’t understand lectures. He doesn’t care about anxious punctuality. Lucas marches to the beat of his own drummer. That drummer? He’s mellow.

Inevitably, I find the socks and, with his body still bent like a soggy pipe cleaner, he reluctantly lets me shove his feet into them. The same thing happens with his shoes. We’re two-thirds of the way done.

Our final act is the most difficult. It involves getting a young man, who weighs more than me, to get the hell out of the backseat.

When he was little, I’d just pick him up. I miss those days. One click of the belt, I’d scoop him up like a bag of rice and head into the building like Uncle Ben.

As he got older, it got a bit harder. He’d change his center of gravity. Now, this big kid felt huge. As I’d toil to move him, he’d keep eye contact with me. It could get infuriating.

Granted, I’d eventually get him out, but it was never pretty. It took forever and, by the time we were done, he’d be unhappy, I’d be unhappy, and one of those freaking shoes was already missing again. By the time we made it into the party, we looked like we had gotten into a parking lot brawl.

Today, I don’t do that. I’m not even sure I could. Sure, I can maneuver him off the ground, but pulling him from a car is not something I have any interest in doing. This isn’t a strongman competition and I’m not Butterbean.

I do the thing that has become a theme in our lives. I bring the mood down and I calmly wait it out.

Staring down at his round little face, as it stares back at me with indignation, I simply say, “We gotta go, buddy. Get up.”

After a minute or two, he usually starts to move. If he doesn’t…I do.

OK, pal. You do you.

I walk away, leaving his door open, and slowly move to the front of the car. Before long, he’s out on his own and walking towards me. His attitude tells me everything I need to know about his motivations.

There’s clapping, hopping, cheering, and kisses on my cheek. To those who don’t know Lucas, they’d assume that his refusal to get out was tied to anxiety or unhappiness. Nope. It’s just what he does. If anything, he might just think it’s funny.

For me, it reminds me to slow down. Life is a mad dash because I sometimes make it one. Will we be late? Maybe. Do I hate that? I do. Will the walls come tumbling down because of it? They haven’t yet.

The best part about a lesson like this is that you don’t realize it at first. After all, it comes across as just an annoying thing that I, as a dad, need to deal with. In reality, it’s a prime example that the world can wait a few minutes when we need it to.

Also, it’s the perfect balance for Lucas and me. I’ve talked about making him slow down during his overwhelmingly excitable moments to breathe. Every time, no matter how worked up he is, my son will always stop for a few seconds to take a breath when I ask him to.

Now, I see that I do the same thing for him.

He doesn’t race the clock, and I can’t always crawl at his pace, but together we somehow create something that works. I slow him when the world gets too loud. He slows me when I make the world too loud. And in the middle of a parking lot, with socks in the seats and shoes half on, I’m reminded that neither of us has to be perfect. We just have to keep showing up for each other.