i remember when we first decided to get upset about school bells. every 45 minutes there would the first bell, signifying it was time to leave class, and then 7 minutes later, the second bell, signifying that you should definitely be at your next class by now. we herded like little sheep from class to class, hoping that we could fit in a quick detour to see our latest crush before heading into social studies. better yet, could we see them, look entirely past them, and then pretend we were going the wrong way so we could lap them once more.
no, just me?
we live around deadlines. the school bells have turned into google calendar pings. alarms, obligations, expiration dates, school bells, ultimatums. and then there’s literal deadlines, like the ones we have at work for that big feature story set to run on sunday. and then there’s elusive deadlines, like death. we know when the most random ones are coming, like an expiring drivers license, but don’t know how long we have until we have to say bye to someone. it’s fun.
i’ve been thinking a lot about deadlines recently because they have a way of making us feel like we’re putting one foot in front of another. we’ve been trained that getting up and going to our next class is progress, or hitting submit is success. but what happens in a world where deadlines go away? even at my job, i spend a lot of time wanting to hit publish by certain times, but often those times are ones that i’ve chosen and just decided to torture myself with.
moving through life at your own pace sounds good but how scary does it sound to only rely on your emotions around fulfillment, rather than society’s definition of fulfillment, to actually be fulfilled?
you may think that i’m about to tell you to ditch the morning alarm and just float through life, but i’m not that predictable now that this newsletter is nearly three years old. instead i just think i want to evolve to a place where deadlines aren’t my only definition of success.
what i mean is, what if i stop measuring my story development in weeks and days, but instead track the natural evolution of how long it takes to make a certain argument or tell a certain narrative? or we let the alarm bell ring, but then let ourself have a whole three hours before the schedules resume. we hear ‘back to back’ with this perfectly sounding rhythm, but we don’t consider that repetition, at times, can be repetitive.
that said, i’m about to head into my most scheduled, deadline-heavy week of the year (tc disrupt) so, perhaps we start this whole vibe next week?
