Subscribe At Your Own Risk

You know what happens when you don’t go to the dentist for about three years?

You sit down at your computer on a Sunday night and fumble for the right words for a post you are trying to right.

It is not because you can’t come up with anything to say or because your mouth hurts too damn much to write but because of a combination of things.

Parts of your mouth ache and so does your wallet because it knows that the bill that is coming to fix what you have ignored isn’t going to be pretty.

Subscribe At Your Own Risk

There is a certain beauty in those five words.

It lies somewhere between the multiple meanings and references that you can draw from them.

You might interpret those to be specific to the posts that litter and line this blog. You might see it as the writer’s commentary or maybe you’ll find it to mean something else.

Maybe you’ll look at it as I do and think of it in reference to the multiple subscriptions I have to newsletters and magazines.

Because you’ll see a stack of magazines waiting to be read that is matched by an electronic pile of material that requires my attention.

And you’ll understand that time or a lack thereof is the keystone of this particular arch.

You’ll hold an ongoing inner dialogue in which you remind yourself about the critical importance you place upon reading and the need to pare down the pile to be read because time is limited.

Subscribe at your own risk in those terms is about determining what you eliminate from your day so you can make time to read whatever you are thinking about subscribing too.

My children have heard me say that time is a choice.

People who want to be a part of our lives will always work with us to find a way to spend time together and that we should focus our attention on them.

They have heard me say that we always have a choice about how we spend our time and that what we do within those moments speaks volumes.

But they have also heard me say we also need to find ways to turn off our heads and just be.

Spend too much time running on the hamster wheel and you will burn out. Maybe not today and maybe not tomorrow, but one day.

*****

Free time is never as free as we want it to be but the price isn’t always as expensive as we make it out to be.

Unless you skip going to the dentist like I did and then you pay with both physical and emotional discomfort.

Don’t mistake that to mean that I am so wealthy I don’t care about the financial costs associated with the coming visit because I am well aware of what it might be.

And that ‘what it might be’ bothers me because I know that it could have been less had I gone sooner than later.

It is only partially mitigated by acknowledging I was unemployed during a chunk of that time and thought it was more important to pay for my family’s care than my own.

I figured it was better to roll the dice and see if I could avoid major issues for myself and hope that by sending them they wouldn’t develop anything serious either.

Time & Technology

During the past ten years or so time has been one of the key elements in every smartphone or computer purchase I have made.

Upgrade or replacement was based upon a couple of simple questions:

1. How much time do I spend doing things to make the computer/phone work?
2. How much am I willing to spend to replace it so that I don’t have to waste time wrestling with dying technology?

For the sake of clarity that doesn’t mean my first option was to dump the computer or phone so that I could buy a new one.

I always tried to find a way to fix the problem first but there always came a time when it didn’t make sense to keep repairing or trying to do so.

It was only when that point was reached that the decision was made to purchase something new. The same sort of rationale went into decisions about cars too.

We All Have Choices To Make

We all have choices to make and the ability to make choices.

Sometimes we forget this.

I try to remind the kids to remember to own their choices.

I try to remind them that friends and family will remember what we did or didn’t do and how we made them feel.

Sometimes it is legitimate. Sometimes we are busy because we are doing important things and sometimes, well the things we are doing aren’t really that important.

Life is all about the choices we make or do not.

Someone pass me my phone, it is time to make the damn appointment.