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| A less than spectacular photo of the cool little painting that was at the coffee shop & is now in someone's home! |
Sometimes a blog idea is so meaty & juicy & succulent that it grabs you by the imagination & says, "Write me. Now!"
That is in part because of the nature of the idea. It all started when Derrick decided to release something that he'd had for a while. (He does this. A lot. There always seems to be more to let go of, but he's better at it than I am. Neither one of us can compete for a second with Nick & his 99 things, but that's not our intention. At least not yet.) What he released is a coffee table book of photos celebrating Life magazine's 75th anniversary. 75 Years: The Very Best of Life.
I'm going to take it to the Reuter Center, the Osher Life-long Learning Institute at UNCA, & leave it for someone else to take or just peruse. But, as he handed it to me, I said, "You're not as interested in the last 75 years as you are in the next 75 minutes."
Oh!
It hit me even more personally when I tied it directly to the time I've been on the planet in this wonderful body: I'm more interested in the next 54 minutes than I am in the last 54 years. The next 54 minutes! What will happen in the next 54 minutes?
It made me want to get out of my robe & into my jeans & Tesla t-shirt, even though I'm going to do some things here until later in the day when I go out to the library & the post office & to have tea with my new friend Harold (the one who confirmed that Paul Graham was stalking me) & talk about film making. (I have these screenplay ideas, see…) I could do all of these immediate things in my robe & jammy pants, but the idea made me feel so productive that a robe & jammy pants just wouldn't do!
The next 54 minutes. A super useful amount of time. Long enough to accomplish wonders, but not so long the idea of it makes you tired. Not even an hour. Even if you're a little older than me--say, 63 or 72 or even as old as Life magazine was when it made that inspiring book--it won't feel too onerous. Less than 2 hours! Just over an hour! Not even an hour & a half! Worlds can be begun in that time frame, but they can't possibly be finished, so there's no use worrying that you won't get it done.
I'm jazzed, but in such a sustainable way. So, on to the next thing. I've got 54 minutes, after all.
Blog alternative:
273. Think about the next (insert your age here) minutes. What might you want to do? What might you not want to do that you would have done if you hadn't had this thought? Sometimes the best action is to not do the very thing you were about to...
