The beauty of deadlines

I need deadlines. Self-imposed ones work for me as well as any other kind. Our writers’ group had a deadline to get a piece of writing out on the road to a publication before the end of the year and, well, I did it. Yesterday. If I hadn’t had the deadline of the end of the year, I would have been successful in putting it off until.........

The late writer, Douglas Adams, author of the terrifically hilarious five book trilogy that sorted out that thorny answer to Life, the Universe and Everything, once said that he loved deadlines because he liked the whooshing sound they made as they flew by. It’s not that way for me. I need the finite line drawn across the calender or clock face that says, “you have until this point.” Otherwise, time is, obviously, infinite. I have all the time in the world and it’ll never be enough if I put off my departure from the waiting room. Douglas Adams died when he was forty-nine, two years younger than I am now. If he’d thought time was infinite, we wouldn’t have Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect, and I wouldn’t have memories of laughing so hard my sides hurt the next day.

So, once again I say, I did it. It’s the not be-all end-all for which I hope, after all, I’ve resolved to write a book in 2009, but it is a start and not a delay.

Plus, by way of celebration, my husband and I went out for breakfast. We sat by the restaurant's fireplace, enjoying the warmth and wrapping our cold hands around our over-sized coffee mugs, talking of books and movies. Ending one year and getting ready to start a new one buoyed by a sense of accomplishment is a darn good feeling.

Happy New Year’s Eve!