I read philosophy.

Properly.

Dog-eared books. Highlights everywhere. Notes in the margins. Every week, I sit down and try to say something halfway useful about staying calm and decent in a world that makes both things unnecessarily difficult.

And then Easter arrives.

It started the night before, when London decided — confidently, without hesitation, from the bath — that the Easter hat parade required Cindy Lou Who hair.

Not a hat. Not a bonnet with a few flowers glued to it.

Full structural engineering.

Twice.

By "we", I mean Elise. I held things and said "looks good" at the appropriate intervals.

It did look good. Genuinely impressive.

By morning, though, things were already drifting.

Isla-Rose decided she didn't want what was available for breakfast. London wanted toast, but we were out of bread, so that became a whole thing. The car wasn't packed. Byron Bay was no longer a destination, more a loose concept we were hoping to approach eventually.

Then one of them announced she didn't actually want to go to the parade.

Important detail — we had originally decided to skip the parade entirely. Drive straight to Byron. Clean, efficient, sensible.

Somehow, we abandoned that plan.

So now we had:

Elaborate hair
No packed car
One reluctant child
Byron Bay slipping further into the abstract

And one shoe.

Just one.

The other had, apparently, moved on.

It eventually turned up. Somewhere unhelpful.

We got to school.

The parade began.

We presumed thirty minutes.

It was not thirty minutes.

I sat there for almost two hours.

Two hours of the school assembly, followed by 8 minutes of small children walking past in increasingly ambitious Easter constructions, while I quietly recalculated our Byron arrival time and reconsidered every decision that had led me to that specific plastic chair.

Somewhere in hour one, Marcus Aurelius showed up.

He writes a lot about equanimity. The inner citadel. The idea that while the outside world descends into chaos, the mind remains steady. Controlled. Untouched.

He did not, to my knowledge, attend school Easter hat parades.

I'm not saying the framework is wrong.

I'm saying there is a gap.

A meaningful gap between philosophy and sitting in a school hall at 9am, sleep-deprived, watching a teacher rave on about school things for the second hour while someone nearby plays the Wiggles without headphones.

The citadel had a few cracks in it.

Eventually, it ended.

We signed the girls out early, got into the car, and pulled onto the highway.

They were starving. Apparently dying of it. Hadn't eaten since breakfast an hour earlier.

We went through Maccas. Sauce ended up on clothes somewhere just as we left the drive-through. Too bad. Too late. We kept moving.

And then, about twenty minutes in, everything reset.

No debrief. No frustration. No replay of the morning.

The kids were fine. Elise was fine. I was fine.

The chaos had left no residue.

We were just a family on the highway, slightly sticky, heading south.

Like it had never happened.

We got to my family's place that afternoon.

Parked a block away. Carried too much luggage up a hill in the heat. Kids dropping things every few steps. Both suddenly incapable of carrying anything at all.

We reached the door.

The dog had eaten through the flyscreen. Three kids were already running at full volume inside. Someone was yelling. Possibly happy. Possibly not.

We walked straight in.

And that's the part I keep coming back to.

Not the chaos.

That was predictable.

It always is.

Something always runs late. Something always breaks. Someone always loses a shoe.

It's that there's no version of the day where it all smooths out.

You don't arrive somewhere and finally get control.

You just move from one version of chaos… to the next.

Marcus was right about the citadel.

He just didn't mention how often you have to rebuild it.

Not once.

Constantly.

In the car. In the queue. In the hall. Halfway up a hill carrying bags while kids drop things in front of you.

That's not bad news.

That's just how it works.

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Until next time,
Broden Johnson