So I want to tell you about something that happened this weekend. Not the whole trip.
One five-minute piece of it.
But before I do that. I wanted to share last night at Carpinteria, the sky did that thing.
Orange at the bottom. Yellowish red bleeding up into it. The whole horizon looked like it was on fire, soft and slow. I just sat there with my plate on my lap, thinking, "This is why I come out here."
Here's a video of that sky
We went camping at Carpinteria State Beach. We went and hosted friends camping in a tent for the very first time. Location was good. Ocean on one side, the kind of quiet you don't get at home, the kind of weekend you come back from a little more like yourself than when you left. But that's not the story.
We'd just gotten camp set up. Food was out. Everybody was finally sitting down, that first-night feeling where you exhale for the first time in weeks.
I noticed the hood and the top of my van had more and more bugs...were thay mosquitoes? No, they were gnats of somekind, slightly bigger that what i'm used to seeing in LA.
And then they showed up. A swarm of gnats. Not one or two circling a lantern. A swarm. Straight into the campsite, straight over the food, and they did not leave. Not for a second. Not for a minute. For several minutes, they were just there. In the air. In the food. In everybody's face. Like the whole night had an uninvited guest that would not take the hint.
We immediately covered the food, started spraying bug spray and some of the kids took shelter.
Small bugs, Small thing. I know. Nobody writes a song about gnats. But small things teach you plenty, if you let them finish the sentence.
Here's what I noticed once it was over: the food was still good, and the night went on anyway. The gnats didn't show up because the trip was going badly. They showed up because the trip was going well. That's not a coincidence. That's a pattern.
Good and disruption don't take turns. T
hey don't wait politely for each other. They show up in the same five minutes. Say that part again with me, because I want it to land: the swarm does not wait for a bad day to come find you. It shows up on the good one, too. That's not bad luck. That's not a sign. That's just how it works. Call it a law if you want one: nothing good ever arrives with a guarantee against interruption. Not the trip. Not the launch. Not the week you finally got your footing back. Never.
What You Do With It. So the question was never "how do I keep the gnats from showing up?" You don't get that option. Not at a campsite. Not in your business. Not in your life.
The only real question is what you do in the five minutes they're there. You can let five minutes of gnats ruin the whole night. Some people do. They pack it in early.
They talk about the bugs for the rest of the trip. The swarm gets more airtime than the ocean did. Or you do what we actually did.
Five minutes of gnats is not the same thing as a ruined trip. Only you can turn it into one. Back Home. Now here's why I'm telling you this instead of just posting a vacation photo. You know this feeling already. You've been putting in the work. Things are finally lining up. The content's landing. Somebody said yes.
The numbers moved in the right direction for once, finally. And right then, something shows up. A slow week out of nowhere. A platform glitch. A client who goes quiet at the worst possible moment. An inbox full of nothing when you were finally expecting something. That's not the universe telling you to stop. That's just the gnats.
They show up when things are good, just as when things are bad. The difference was never whether they'd come.
The difference is what you do with the five minutes. Not "why is this happening to me?" Not "here we go again."You cover the food. You let it pass. You keep going. Close. That's the whole lesson, from a campsite at Carpinteria.
Good things don't come with a guarantee against interruption. They just don't. So next time the swarm shows up, right in the middle of your good week, don't hand it the whole night. Cover the food. Let it pass.
Keep going.
In your corner,
Adriel.