You can't run their race

My daughter graduated this week.

A qualified nurse. Cap, gown, the whole shebang.

And I sat there watching her cross that stage thinking: I remember the day she arrived as though it was yesterday. I remember holding something that small and thinking - I am entirely responsible for this person. Every decision. Every protection. Every lesson.

And now here she is. Qualified. Capable. Entirely herself. And the pride that naturally welled up was met with another thought: I started off thinking I was entiely responsible for that little being. But I didn't hold her hand crossing that stage. I helped create the conditions - whether perceived as positive or negative at the time. She did the rest.

That's a profound and slightly disorienting thing to sit with.

Two children. Same household.
A friend shared something with me this week that I recognised immediately.

She has three children. The eldest sets a plan, gets on with it and when things get hard, knuckles down and pushes through. The second doesn't plan ahead, doesn't listen when her older sister says it gets tougher, still wants to be saved even as her parents are deliberately trying to build independence in her.

Same parents. Same home. Same values modelled. Two completely different responses to the same environment.
She wasn't sharing this as a failure. She was sharing it as a bewilderment.

I understood.

Because here's what I'm learning - slowly, reluctantly, in the way you only learn things that cost you something:
You can plant the seed. You can tend the soil. You can model the values, create the conditions, hold the space, stay consistent, show up. You can do all of it right.

And then you have to let them grow in the direction they choose.

Not the direction you'd choose for them. Theirs.

What submission actually means
I've been a Muslim my whole life. I know what the word means - someone who practices Islam: submission, surrender to God.

But knowing it as a concept and feeling it in your chest as a parent are very different things.

The prophets - every single one of them - faced this. Adam, Moses, Noah, Abraham, Jesus, Mohamed (peace be upon them all). Sons who didn't follow. Fathers who deemed the ways of old as best. Communities who rejected them. Outcomes that didn't match the effort or the intention. And still they kept planting. Still they kept showing up. Not because they controlled the harvest. Because the planting was theirs to do and the harvest belonged to God.

That's not a comfortable theology when you're watching someone you love make choices you wouldn't make for them.

But it's an honest one.

This is what submission looks like from the inside. Not peaceful acceptance - not at first. It arrives as frustration, as powerlessness, as the uncomfortable gap between what you hoped and what is. And then, if you sit with it long enough, it becomes something else. Not resignation. Release.

You stop trying to run their race. And you go back to running yours.

The run
On Sunday I ran for an hour and eighteen minutes. My longest run in a long time.

And I made a deliberate decision before I started: I would run slower than I knew I could. Not because I had to. Because the distance required it. Because I was playing a longer game than my legs wanted to play in the moment.

Other runners came past me. Faster. Lighter. Barely breaking a sweat.

Every instinct said: pick it up. Keep pace. Don't be the slow one.

I held my pace anyway.

Because I knew my race. I knew my distance. I knew what the last twenty minutes would cost me if I spent myself too early. And no one else on that path knew those things about me. Their pace had nothing to do with mine.

That's not a running insight. That's everything I've been learning this week about parenting, about leadership, about faith.

You cannot run their race.

And when you try - when you spend your energy matching someone else's pace, steering someone else's direction, managing someone else's harvest - you exhaust yourself on a race that was never yours to run.

What you can do
This week I also watched a team I've been leading through a significant change programme sit down together for a small lunch. To mark the work we've been doing and the culture that's been building.

Did I contribute to, maybe even shape, the conditions for that culture? Perhaps. But I didn't create the culture. They did - by choosing to inhabit the space that was created.

And I watched leaders in another context commit to a set of expectations they'll hold each other to. Accountability they chose. Not because I told them to. Because I helped them see the value of it.

And my daughter, who I held as something impossibly small twenty-something years ago, walked across a stage and became a nurse.

I didn't do any of that. I helped till the soil.

The growing - every bit of it - was theirs.

Final thought
So here are the questions I'm sitting with this week - and I'd invite you to sit with them too:

• Where are you trying to run someone else's race - as a parent, a leader, a mentor - when your job was always just to prepare the track?

• What would it look like to hold your pace, even when everyone around you seems to be moving faster or differently than you'd like?

• And what might be possible - in your children, your team, the people you love - if you stopped managing the harvest and trusted the One who created the soil you've just been tending?

Because you can plant. You can tend. You can show up, season after season, and do the work with everything you have.

But you can't run their race.

And the sooner you stop trying, the better you'll run your own.

Go on. Take the Next Step.