Lately I’ve been receiving this annoying reminder from Google.

“You have used 99% of your storage space,” it states. “Pretty soon you won’t be able to add/edit this document.”

Whenever this happens, I start combing through and deleting countless blurry photos of myself skiing (you know, the ones which, when they were taken, seemed destined to attract thousands of Instagram followers and inspire countless others to get out the door and try their best….but then, upon further review, had the motivational clarity equivalent of leftover green bean casserole).

I ruthlessly eliminate cherished memories, throwing out various 36-second clips of Ajee running down a ski trail or me running up a treadmill into the electronic trash bin. Then — with the storage space now only 98.5% full — I continue on with my life.

Sometimes, I’m forced to conduct a deeper clean.

In those instances, I’ll inevitably run down rabbit trails of past dreams from days gone by. Some sketches of lives not fully lived — like those old drafts of my 200-page Exercise Science Master’s Thesis or that carefully handwritten script for my original 5th-grade honor choir musical — bring back smiles and remind me I’m currently living in an unfinished, still-being-written story. Other times, coming face to face with the fact that I have hundreds (hundreds?!) of random word documents — containing everything from bucket list bike rides to ideas for The Next Great American Novel (I’ve generally excelled at hyperlinking MTBProject links within the former category and failed to follow through on anything significant from the latter) — only seem to cement a discouraging reality:

I can’t seem to accomplish my goals.

In most of my moments of honest reflection, this finish line fumble has always been introspectively conveyed from my objective intellectual self to my philosophically wandering inner soul as a parasitic bug. It’s evidence I’m crippled by a disease preventing me from ‘doing it all’ or ‘writing that book.’ It’s a reminder I gave all that kind of stuff up when I took that job, moved here, had kids and/or ….whatever else happened.

Alas, hope is not lost! Maybe those child-like fragments of my imagination aren’t a bug, but a feature after all! Maybe I CAN actually do something with them.

Maybe, contrary to that one Hardees commercial, I really CAN make the track team. ({Hardees mascot, singing}: “Say ‘Yes I can with Hardees ROAST BEEF SANDWICH!’ …{fat guy’s response, singing, kind of}: “Yes I can, now I’m FEELING FINE!!!!!)

Maybe — and perhaps most importantly — I’ve been measuring progress all wrong, all along.

In a book by an editor to writers, Betsy Lerner revealed a story in which her teacher once read a poem that — unbeknownst to Lerner — had been composed using only the her (Lerner’s) previously (albeit short) handed-in works. The teacher had spent time identifying themes in her students’ fragments, piecing them together in a meaningful way until they provided a coherent narrative.

After hearing the work read back to her and realizing it was all her own writing, Lerner raced home to revisit the rest of her other “acorns”, all of which were presumably patiently waiting in the forgotten Google docs of that era to be transformed into oak trees.

“If you are struggling with what you should be writing, look at your scraps,” Lerner advises in her book “The Forest for the Trees.”

Here’s an adjacent takeaway: writing those scraps in the first place must therefore be incredibly meaningful work.

Maybe all you have time for in this season of life is composing a bunch of small epiphanies. The quote jotted down at a stoplight on the way to the grocery store, the epiphany captured in a voice memo or the poignant paragraph penciled in-between the budget lines of the church bulletin.

It’s an idea here. A lyric there.

A melody, an abstract, a plot plan or a character description here. A working title there.

Put it down. Get started. Plod.

This blog is home to many unpublished pieces.

I now proclaim this once discouraging reality REFRAMED!

To be honest, it’s probably best some of those graphs stay private. And most of the others, if headed for public consumption, probably need some cleaning up — to put it mildly.

Maybe you’re like me. Maybe you used to judge the day by a project’s tangible progress. The word count. The ready-to-share link. The letter to the editor actually being in today’s newspaper. But when some mornings are spent revisiting an unfinished post, editing or revising 3-month old ideas (for the third or fourth or 14th time!!) while stirring the kids’ oatmeal (and putting out fires between said kids) I’m left feeling (more often than not) like I’m getting absolutely nowhere. I have nothing to show for my sweat, blood and tears, you know?

Actually, I do.

I realize now, I don’t need to post to make progress.

And I think this applies to other areas of life, too.

The End.

(Writer proceeds to ‘post’ post instead of transitioning to another section for further elaboration or going back to edit obvious typos. Take that for what it’s worth, too)

**Keep on Striving.

**Keep on Skiing!

-The Seder-Skier