Milestones

Imagine a poster on the kitchen wall with thousands of tiny squares lined up like some oversized graph paper. The label for each square contains a number, starting with 1 and ending around 27,000. From the top down, most of the boxes have big red X’s marked through them.

The poster provides a way to visualize each day in a typical human lifespan. Taken collectively, the ones already spent far outnumber the ones remaining for 40-something’s and older.

Time is such a cherished resource. It cannot be replenished like wealth, possessions, and climbing the corporate ladder. The sad reality is most of it has already been committed to things like sleep, earning a living, and cleaning the bathroom.

As days turn into weeks, months, and years, being intentional in how to spend those precious few moments of unstructured time becomes more and more urgent. For part-time authors, that means trying to carve out writing in between the day job, household chores, and all those other demands of everyday life.

It’s been a year since launching my author website. Hard to believe 365 days have dawned and sunsetted. Some of those days have been incredibly productive, completing a manuscript and starting two others. But the long spell of life getting in the way has taken a toll, where the demands of family needs and illness prevented the mindset or minutes needed to craft and edit narratives.

Actually, it's times like these—full of trials, hope, and resilience— that feed the soul of a story, allowing the writer to instill the authentic feelings of struggle and triumph into her characters that all humans endure.

As we step through the seasons of our lives, let us spend our most valuable resource on something that matters. Let each of those minutes count today. No telling how many more will be gifted to us.