You guys! I am thrilled to report that today I completed drafts for all 40 rules that will be in the book! I ended up including 6 of the top 7 rules voted on by you, so thank you to all who voted! (I decided the rule “Thou shalt take yourself seriously” was a theme that ran throughout many of the ones I already had, so that didn’t make it.) Almost all of my writing took place outside near Lake Michigan today, as it was finally sunny and beautiful :)
Tomorrow I will be hitting the sketchbook hard. I have plans to use much of my existing art in the final book, but I need to create a lot more to round things out. I’m looking forward to that!
I will let the stuff I wrote these past few days simmer on the back burner for a week or two before returning to them with fresh eyes. I think I’ve got a good start, but there’s a lot of room for refinement. That being said, here are 10 more nuggets that came out of todays session:
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“It’s an incontrovertible fact: it is impossible to hear Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” while driving and not transform into a head-banging, lyric-belting, steering wheel-pounding god or goddess of rock & roll.”
“I bought a cinnamon roll that was about as big as my head. Now, I didn’t need a cinnamon roll as big as my head, but that’s all they had. I felt full long before the cinnamon roll was finished but it killed me to throw the last of it away. It seemed like the equivalent of burning my wallet. But what’s the alternative? I doubt the barista would oblige a request to pay half for a cinnamon roll as big as a baby’s fist.”
“Maybe we should give our kids the gift of doing less. Maybe we should bless them with boredom. If that doesn’t help matters, I’m sure my mom could find something for them to do.”
“When it comes to dishing out guilt and defending the rules that don’t exist, Adultitis doesn’t deal in logic.”
“Play is the miracle drug we’ve been looking for!”
“When we die, will we be judged poorly because we didn’t reply to every email?”
“Give your waistline a gift and throw your guilt down the garbage disposal. You really don’t have to clean thy plate.”
“Taking the time to do nothing once in a while – especially with the people we love – is often the single most important thing we can do in an entire day. In fact, I strongly suspect that at the end of our lives, all of us will wish we would have spent a little bit more time doing nothing.”
“Now all of a sudden you’re an agent of social change at the wheel. You’re Bono in a blue minivan.”
“Warning: if you measure your level of importance and value by how busy you are, there’s a pretty good chance the story you’re living sucks.”
Amen about the Journey song! :)