The Late Muscle

“I am compulsive about that,” Merlin explains of his obsession with punctuality and trying to teach those lessons to his kid:

You can’t explain how important it is that if we need to leave the house by 7:30 […] if we made it by 7:31 then [...] Apollo has crashed. That’s it. You don’t get another chance at this. Every day you do you’re building a late muscle.

I love that idea of the late muscle. Why? Because I have one. Lately I’ve felt as if I’m late to meetings all the time. I’m flakey. Unpredictable. I bail on my friends constantly and at the last second I’ll be heading to an event and just drop out before I get there.

I need to try harder with this stuff. A lot harder. Like, I need to try at least a tiny bit. Because once you start caring less about punctuality and showing up on time it gets increasingly difficult to fix. The late muscle has already grown strong.