I think there is an argument that the post linked above represents the best of my July 12 work. This could be a reflection of its necessity, for most posts written in so little time turn out to be completely useless. The more common example of how a strong piece comes together is the prior year's edition. Unlike with "Lost" - in fact, unlike with most of TOA up to that point - I remember this one taking up a great deal of energy. I think it represented something of a turning point for me as it relates to how I think about writing. Prior to the 2019 edition of the July 12 post, I suspect I had always regarded any strenuous effort as an anomaly; my expectation was that writing for something casual like TOA should be efficient, that it should come easily to me. If I spent more time than expected on a piece, I had regarded it as evidence of a mistake on my part - perhaps I had started without a clear idea, or followed one too many digressions beyond a logical ending. There was something, it seems, that I didn't quite understand about time. "Where The Walls Don't Talk" illuminated something I'd failed to understand even after several hundred posts - the best writing is the result of the hardest work.
The bizarre thing about such a revelation is that I've always known this, and not just in the context of other domains. I knew it back in 2016, when I took a short break from my regularly scheduled nonsense to produce a fairly astonishing post. I've gotten some great comments on "What I Learned This Year" (with the line "I learned that I was the Business Bro, all along" earning specific accolades) but I was actually surprised for a moment when I reread it a few minutes ago - it's good, you know? The thing about it, though, is that if I think back to 2016, I recall that the post took at least a full month to write, starting with a few hours spent on the banks of the Charles with a pen and a notebook. You don't have to be a writer to write something good - you just have to know how to use time, which is what writers demonstrate whenever they work on something for a month. Possibly, the only thing to learn from "What I Learned This Year" is the danger of expecting good work without hard work.
This lesson isn't strictly a matter of putting in hours. When I compare the 2016 effort to my 2017 post - which nodded to the prior year's effort without bothering to make eye contact - or to what I posted in 2018, I get the sense that I'd drifted from the necessary understanding, conflating hard work with long hours. As I reread this pair of posts, I was able to see the underlying thread - the years after my mom died changed me not because of the events that transpired in that time, but rather because of how I started to see the world differently. To put it another way, if I had done the same things in those years a decade earlier, it would have led to entirely different results; those same commercials would have had no effect on me, and I might have accepted those job offers. I think it was possible to have explained this in either of those years, but since it would have been hard I opted instead to merely put in the time, never understanding that I was walking steadily on a trail that required an occasional sprint, or that the mode of travel sometimes changes your destination. If you keep doing the same things with your time, you eventually realize that you keep ending up in the same place all the time.
But of course, too much time looking back is often the surest way to stop our progress. There is a fine line between reminiscing and regret. So, what's going to happen now? I have a whole day ahead of me, the daylight hours free of commitments, essentially all the time in the world. It feels like the writing will be up to me, but I could be wrong. It's never clear to me how I decide if something is worth the effort. A few years ago, I hurried into a Starbucks and ordered a plain iced coffee. Five minutes passed, then five more. It didn't seem unusually busy. I had to ask myself something that I've started asking myself regularly over the next six years, the past six years - is it worth the effort? I decided to wait for ten more minutes, cutting a deal with myself - if Mom dies today, I'm never going back to a Starbucks. I haven't quite held myself accountable to this commitment - I've learned not to impose trivial personal grudges - but when I have gone back, it's never been my idea, and it's never been alone. There is something valuable about time, even if it's just twenty minutes, that you understand on the one day you can't get it back. There is something about time that changes when you start to see the world differently, and there is something about the way we use time that changes when we accept this shifting perspective.
I wasn't sure about tomorrow at the start of this post, but my suspicion now is that it will come and pass without the usual TOA acknowledgment. The fact is that a big change in my life now feels more like a big fact about a changed life, where the recent pattern of skipping Monday posts feels more natural than extending a five-year streak. I suppose change comes to everything. I am working tomorrow for the first time on a July 12, but what feels relevant is less so this fact and more about the way the date snuck up on me this year - it never crossed my mind to take the day off. I have always scheduled my running in July to allow for a long run on this date, but this year I don't plan to run at all. Perhaps all of this will hit me again in the full normalcy of a post-COVID world, or when I regret tomorrow's inbox missing the usual TOA notification, but I have my doubts. I think I've said all there is to say for now - what I learned, how I changed, what I lost. It may be that I need to talk about something else, possibly regret, but for now I don't have much more to say about it. I think what I'll regret is putting in more time as a substitute for hard work, and what I have left to say about tomorrow isn't ready for the hard work it requires today. I think what I'll regret is what I've always regretted - the way I used my time, those twenty minutes from a changed life, when I thought I had all the time in the world.
