The Due Date

You never quite realize how much time and energy is spent on such mundane things until you remember that neither are as expendable as you've been treating them. There is a limited amount of both; a deadline that you will eventually approach, and once that date hits, the only thing you'll be hoping for is that the product of all that time and energy spent will have been decent enough to make some kind of mark on the world, like a novel, a novella, a short story, or just a lonely blog caught in the cyber time capsule. You won't be wishing that you spent more time on Facebook reposting the same pictures that at least 12 of your other "friends" have already shared. You won't be pondering all of the most updated pins on Pinterest that you've missed in the last three hours off the computer. You won't be wondering how one of the worst characters in the world, Ted Mosby, ended up meeting his wife as you follow obliviously along with the laugh tracks for your cue to enjoy a joke. That is, unless your last moments of conscious thought are annihilated by some kind of feverish delusional state of mind.

The moments that you are going to recall with a sense of wonder and true contentment are those when you are freed from the burdens of a strictly web-based social life. They're going to be the moments when you first learned a new trick or how to completely play Mary Had a Little Lamb on the piano without looking at the book or your hands. They're going to be the moments when you were exchanging laughter with loved ones and you can't help but smile when you recount the freedom of childlike amusement. They're going to be the times when you escaped into a world of curiosity and discovered for yourself revelations that only few others have encountered before in their lives. Sometimes they're not the most productive moments, and sometimes they're not long-lasting, but they're the moments that make the struggles in life well worth the effort, and they're the moments that compile your personal story.

Trust me, you don't want to hit that deadline and all you have to show for it is a pile of disorganized scrap paper with scribbles and frequently repeated lines carelessly scratched into them with a pen that ran all out of ink well before hour zero.