Do you ever have one of those days when something doesn’t go well or as anticipated and you have difficulty escaping the memory? You then “replay the memory” over and over throughout the day. At times you briefly think you’ve eradicated it from the horizon of your consciousness only to discover the re-emergence of the unpleasant memory a few minutes later. That, too, makes for a day filled with yuck.
Suggesting that it was “adding insult to injury” would be an unfair accusation when in reality it shouldn’t have bothered me at all. There was certainly no malicious intent and the honesty of another can’t be faulted. A colleague that I haven’t had an opportunity to visit with in two or three weeks joked with me about my blunder related to the answering machine message inadvertently left on my iPhone. I responded, “So you read my blog?” He said, “No, I didn’t read your blog, but I heard about what you did. I’m just sorry I didn’t get to hear the message for myself.” “So who told you,” was my response. “I’m not saying, but I have my sources.”
I then asked if he saw the article over the weekend about the picture of the basketball team with the trophy. He sensitively and politely communicated that the time it would take to read my blog was more than he regularly has time to commit. “Different strokes for different folks” is the expression that immediately lodged in the resources of my mind. I was okay with that. People who choose the "Wall Street Journal" over my blog are making an excellent choice. Yet, like the unpleasant memory that resurfaced periodically throughout the day, the additional competing thought that my blogs are too long also weighed heavily in some corner of my mind.
So what do I do with that? It is a good question. I’ve been told by a very knowledgeable media specialist that a blog or written article should not exceed 450 words. It isn’t that I purposefully “throw in one more word for good measure”. The reality is “I throw in an extra thousand words for good measure.”
I have a friend who can talk for hours on the telephone. On occasion, she will utter the phrase, "To make a long story short"simply to give me false hope. Her stories are always interesting, but sometimes it is a stretch for me to devote the time. Could the same be said of my blogs? Probably.
Perhaps the question is self-evident. It has been around for a long time. “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Perhaps I’ll have an answer my morning.
Good Day!
Don