Do I have to?
Every parent could use a few of these.
Atlanta has roughly a bazillion public and private pools. I’m a kid who grew up on the beach, so it was a whole different world that I did not encounter until I was an adult.
And one of the things I learned early on in my membership at Piedmont Park Aquatic Center is the existence and purpose of adult swim (not to be confused with the cable network by that name, also based in Atlanta).
You may believe, as I did, that adult swim is an opportunity for the grownups to enjoy the pool without all of those pesky kids getting in the way.
But adult swim happens for the last ten minutes of every hour regardless of whether there are any adults who actually want to swim. So that can’t be the whole story.
No, the real purpose of adult swim is to make sure that kids have an opportunity to use the bathroom, eat occasionally, and — most importantly — to leave the premises and go home.
No kid really wants to get out of the pool. But they’ll do it if they have to. And on some level, an exhausted kid is relieved to have an indisputable reason to do so. (It’s also nice that the parent doesn’t have to be the bad guy.) Adult swim is a reality of life, like the cycles of the moon and tides. It cannot be argued with — it must be accepted and endured.
The average kid will check in about any such undesirable request: “Do I have to?” However, it’s a token resistance. They know the answer is going to be yes, and they want to make sure. Then, upon hearing the bad news, they will generally roll their eyes and do the thing. They don’t want to, but they will if they have to.
Those of us who no longer have the boundaries that were set by parents, teachers, and other authority figures hemming us in on a daily basis must manage ourselves. And some of us can only function when we “have to.” That is, it’s only an external deadline or accountability to some other party that can trick us into doing what must be done.
Others of us, resistant to doing what we have to, can only function when we have an escape route. As Laura Nyro once sang, “All I ask of living is to have no chains on me.” It may be dramatic to frame some routine deliverable that happens to be due tomorrow as a type of bondage, but sometimes it feels that way.
As a kid, I was obedient. But strangely, I’m in the second camp here: I would rather work on the thing that’s due in three weeks than the one that’s due tomorrow. If the answer is, “Yes, you have to,” I will fight it.
I don’t know why I’m like this, but I’ve figured out how to work with it. The solution is that I need to be well ahead of any deadlines I may face. The answer to the question, “Do I have to?” needs to be NO in order for me to do my best work.
Meanwhile, if you’re the first type of person, you will need to set your deadlines such that the answer to the question, “Do I have to?” is always “I’m afraid so.” That doesn’t mean that the deadlines need to be tight, but maybe you have to trick yourself into having them be that way — perhaps with the help of another person who helps you to stay on track.
For better or worse, for us grownups, there is no more adult swim to remind us that it’s time to eat or to pee or to go home and get ready for bed (“We’ll skip your bath tonight — the chlorine probably killed all of the germs on you”). That means we have to/get to build our own cues to help us do the things we set out to do in a way that harmonizes with our preferred working style and works around our bad habits and common pitfalls.
It may seem silly to put parental controls on your own phone or set an alarm for your own bedtime, but if it helps you reach your goals and live a pleasant life, it’s fair game.
Even kids sometimes secretly want the answer to, “Do I have to?” to be yes. They know it’s for their own good. As we mature, we stop asking and stop resisting. We do what needs to be done because we know that, in the end, we will be glad we did. Most of the time.
