A Quarter Mile at a Time

“I live my life one quarter mile at a time. Nothing else matters: not the mortgage, not the store, not my team and all their bullshit. For those ten seconds or less, I’m free.” Vin Diesel, Fast & the Furious

Call it recklessness if you’d like. I call it the seconds my body remembers it is free.

Time no longer feels wide open to me. Safety no longer feels assumed. The stakes of loving and being loved no longer feel abstract. My body has lived inside waiting rooms, scan schedules, surgical timelines, probabilities, risk curves, and the long quiet space where you wait to find out who you are allowed to be next. I realized early that the future is not something you rest inside of. It is something you hold carefully, and sometimes, fearfully, at arm’s length. So, I have learned to live in windows. Not five-year plans. Not “when things settle down”. Not someday. But windows. Windows of laughter that drop me back into my body. Windows of moments when my chest loosens because someone gets me. And in those seconds, I feel my body remember what it means to be alive. For ten seconds, I’m not managing, explaining, preparing, scanning, worrying, protecting. For ten seconds, I’m home. This is freedom. This is my quarter mile.

The seconds that feel like home are made of people. Not the people I perform for. Not the people I manage. Not the people who require a version of me that stays intact and appropriate. But the ones whose presence lowers the volume in my chest. The ones whose voice bring my shoulders down an inch. The ones who let me leave my armor on the floor. It’s the relief of not having to translate myself. It’s being held by conversation instead of held together by effort. It’s where my breath finally stops hovering and starts landing.

For ten seconds, my body is not on alert.

For ten seconds, my nervous system unclenches.

For ten seconds, I am home.

Choosing connection in a world that trains us to live handcuffed to logistics, fear, and survival mode feels like a quiet rebellion. My quarter mile is made of these moments: the ones where I refuse to postpone feeling alive, where I refuse to wait for the perfect season to feel deeply, where I refuse to trade presence for productivity. And this choice is radical. To choose presence in a culture obsessed with output. To choose connection in a world that rewards numbness. To choose joy even when life has shown you how fragile things really are. My quarter mile lives here, in the seconds when I am not running a calculation, bracing for impact, or holding myself together.  

We are told to be responsible. To be practical. To be measured. To be prepared. But we are not often told to be alive. And when your life has included trauma, illness, loss, or long-term uncertainty, your body learns something very specific: relief lives in moments. Safety lives in connection. Freedom lives in now. My quarter mile exists in exactly these places.

I’ve learned to live on a different time scale. Not decades. Not retirement. Not “later”. But in windows of aliveness – those slices of time where the world loosens its grip and I finally remember what it feels like to breathe, to laugh, to simply be. This is the life I choose to return to, again and again, one quarter mile at a time. I return to these moments because my body remembers what it carried. Because my nervous system knows what it needs. Because aliveness is not optional, it’s essential. These moments don’t exist in abstractions or plans. They exist in real, lived experience: the way breath deepens, shoulders drop, laughter lands in the chest. They are fleeting, yes, but they are enough. They are home.

So yes, freedom lives here. Not as an escape, but as presence. As connection. As the quiet, undeniable knowing that you are alive, even if only for a quarter mile at a time.