There's a moment every parent knows and nobody warns you about.
You're watching your kid do something. On a trail, in a game, just living their life. And you catch yourself thinking: they don't need anything from me right now. Not advice, not a correction, not a heads up about what's coming next. They're just in it. Fully. And your job in that moment is to get out of the way and try not to ruin it by saying something.
I have that moment with Karsten more than I used to. More than I expected.
He's becoming something. I don't mean that in the abstract parental way where every kid is becoming something. I mean I can watch it happening in real time, in specific moments, and it has a shape I recognize. The focus he brings to training. The way he processes a loss. Quietly, internally, without a lot of drama. The questions he asks, which are getting less about what to do and more about why. Those are monk questions. Most people his age aren't asking them yet.
On the trail together it shows up clearly. He's not riding to prove anything. He's riding to get better at riding, which sounds obvious but isn't. There's a different quality of attention in a person who is genuinely trying to improve versus a person who is trying to perform. You can see it in how they handle the moments that don't go well. Karsten gets quiet when something doesn't work. He files it. He tries it again. I watch this and I keep my mouth shut, which, I'll be honest, takes more effort than it probably should.
I have so many things I want to say. Every parent does. The shortcut I found the hard way, the mistake he's about to make that I made too, the thing I wish someone had told me at his age. Most of it I don't say. Some of it I say too early and he looks at me with that patient expression that means he already knew. The lesson there is ongoing.
What I've come to believe is that the best thing I can do for him isn't the coaching. It's the modeling. Showing up for my own practice. The rides, the stillness work, the daily commitment to getting better at things I'll never fully master. That matters more than any advice I hand him. Kids don't learn from what you tell them. They learn from watching what you actually do when no one's grading you.
There's something that happens in motion together that doesn't happen any other way. Car rides after sessions, both of us tired, the conversation that starts because neither of us is looking at the other. The trail where you're riding single file for twenty minutes and then pull over and he asks something you weren't expecting. Being in the physical world together, doing something that demands real attention, creates a different kind of opening than sitting down to talk. I've had more real conversations with him on a hill than across a table.
I think about the pursuit of presence. What it means, what it costs, what it gives back. And then I watch Karsten and I see someone who is finding it on his own terms, in his own time, without needing me to define it for him. That's the thing you actually hope for as a parent. Not that they follow your path. That they find their own version of the same true thing.
My job is to stay in my lane, keep riding, and not say the thing I'm thinking unless he asks.
He doesn't always ask. He's doing fine.
— JH
