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When my brother pointed out to me the fictitiousness of certain cop procedurals on the television, we started talking about how boring actual police work can be.

The same is true for most onscreen depictions. Life, when exposed in two hour increments, or less, is often quite dull. Yes, there are those moments of excitement, but in general they don’t come all that often.

That said, we should embrace the quirks of our own lives. In Lois Roelofs’s Write Along With Me, she states, “No one wants to read boring stuff, so look for those things that make you unique. None of us is the same, so capitalize on it.”

This advice goes to writing by using yourself as character, but it’s also a reminder that while we entertain ourselves with stories of truly remarkable circumstances, there’s plenty in our own lives to keep us interested and engaged.

I was driving through Jacksonville recently, and as I crossed the Fuller Warren Bridge, I recalled a bit of the audio book I was listening to one time as I drove across.

The story was Thanks for the Trouble, by Tommy Wallach. Looking back, I found that I had read it in sometime between October and December of 2017. Admittedly, it was young adult novel. But there’s a girl who’s planning to jump from a bridge to end her (unusually) long existence. So, perhaps it was the bridge that triggered the memory. Hard to say.

But it’s interesting that some stories will stay with you long after the experience. I can recall my first time seeing Lord of the Rings (as well as other movies from the late nineties and early aughts). Reading Gaiman, Godin, and Ferris. That joke my stepmother told me concerning Mickey’s divorce from Minnie (though the language used is probably the rationale for that remembering).

At the time it may seem so innocuous. But years later, it truly is amazing which of the narratives have stuck with us. Something we heard, or felt, that really resonated with us – indelibly burning its content into our memory.

As with all things we’ve done for a while, you’ve probably developed a way that you like doing things. Disruptions to the process are inevitable, and sometimes those disruptions are permanent.

Finding workarounds is a way to keep the system running as close to the way you like it as possible. 

Workarounds can become part of the system as well.

Early in Photoshop’s development, there were some photographers who would repeat editing tasks – like coloration, for instance, or including a copyright or watermark. They used external software at first to batch these actions, but the functionality was eventually included.

Workarounds can make use of new technologies, knowledge of other industries, or even just a little ingenuity. 

At the end of the day, it’s what we leave behind that matters.

And I don’t mean the things we accumulate. It’s connections, the people whose lives we touch, and who mean something to us in return.

It’s what we produce. The thoughts that we’ve written down, the creations we’ve made, and the lives we’ve built.

Think about the legacy that you want to leave behind. 

There’s a divide in numbers that we don’t often think about. For instance, the distance between one million and one billion.

One million seconds is 11 days. That’s not too bad. One-half of a month, and you’ve covered one million seconds.

How much do you think a billion seconds is?

Go on, take a guess.

It’s 31 years. When we only have a vague understanding – the words, but not the concept – than we miss the context of what is being talked about.

Sometimes I’ll ask of what I’m doing – “is this the best usage of my time?” You know, I write a lot about being creative, and being productive, and not being distracted. That’s all well and good, but we’re not machines.

I’ve seen some truly remarkable people at work and they’ll barrel right through. Nothing seems to get in their way. But it’s not for everyone. The best use of your time isn’t always what others would call the best use of your time.

There is a group of Americans, and I don’t know how big that is, but there is a group who as yet remain undecided. Sometime between now and November they’ll have to make that choice.

I think what it ultimately comes down to is an individual vision of America. No one should be happy with the way the country is. The question will be: do we believe that the fault lies with the current administration? Or is it in spite of the administration’s attempts to improve it?

All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible. ~ T. E. Lawrence

Tom Magliozzi (host of NPR’s Cart Talk) once said that “Reality often astonishes theory.” I wrote this down at the time I heard it, and recently came across it again.

It reminds me of another saying, this one by Mike Tyson. “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”

And they both seem pertinent now, because no matter how prepared any of us felt for this year, it seems that nothing has gone to plan. So, we get to improvise. Play around, hope, and pray. After all, next year is only mere months away.