Recently, I spent a weekend at a writer’s retreat, and the whole thing is to go away and write. It’s like The Dick Van Dyke Show episode where Rob Petrie goes away to the cabin to write his book because he couldn’t focus at home. It’s a common writer’s idea. I won’t write today, because someday, I’ll have a ton of time to write and boy, won’t it be great. Like Harry Chapin Carpenter’s “Cat’s In The Cradle”, we’re gonna have a good time then.

The thing is, I don’t buy it. Writing is a daily habit because if you wait for the perfect time to write, it will never, ever come. There’s never going to be a good time.

A friend at work, whom I love to hate, and hate to love, gave us a book which has the secret to life. Seriously. It’s by Jeff Olson, and it’s called The Slight Edge. The idea of the book is simple, people are successful by the little choices they make, every day, just itty, bitty little choices that by themselves don’t mean much, but over time, add up and make all the difference in the world. Writing is like that. If you wrote 43 minutes a day, which is the length of a Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode, you would have a novel faster than if you waited for eight hour chunks. Because how often do you have eight hour chunks? If you have my life, you never have them. You long for them. You hunt for them. They are an endangered animal, elusive, yet beautiful. Come here, little eight hours, come to Daddy.

So I’m enjoying the writers retreat because I’m using it to sneak in projects I won’t have time to tackle once I return to normal life. So in the end, maybe that’s the best way to use the time I got, sneak in the impossible books I’ll never have the time to write.

And Rob Petrie never did write his novel. He got distracted. It’s not about the time you don’t have, it’s about using the time you do have, and realizing how lucky you are in this moment and being grateful.

And that pistachio episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show always unnerved me. Pistachios, everywhere, weird.