Sunday ☕ : The March of Time

Diesel and Curtains

Somewhere between sleep and wakefulness, before you open your eyes, your nose already knows where you are. Not home. The faint chemical cool of hotel air conditioning, the peculiar flatness of recirculated air, and underneath it all, the low rumble of a semi pushing through the dark at 80 miles an hour just outside your window. The curtains are doing their best to muffle the sound. They’re losing.

Laurie, Weasley the dog, and I are making our annual Texas heat escape to the Adirondack mountains. We’re starting day two of three or four, depending on speed and traffic.

There is something clarifying about being in motion. Stripped of your routines, your usual chair, your coffee cup that always sits in the same spot, you notice things you’d stopped seeing. You notice time.

Books of Days

Back in the 1980s, I started keeping a business diary. Every day, two pages: a to-do list on one side, notes from the day on the other. Meetings attended, ideas sparked, names of people I needed to call. One book for every two months, roughly, stacked up across the decades into a small library of my own making.

A few weeks ago I needed to find a code for something I’d purchased back around 2009 or 2010. I wasn’t sure of the exact year, so I started at one end and began combing pages. Every page. Every day.
I never found the code.

What I Found

What I found instead was harder to name and more valuable than whatever I was looking for.

You’ve heard people say the map is not the territory. What I held in my hands was something close to the opposite: the territory of my actual life, written down while I was living it, before I knew how any of it would turn out. Every worry, every plan, every person I was about to meet for the first time.

Two pages a day in a daily diary. Multiply that across years, and you’d have something that no photograph could give you. Not how things looked, but how things felt. What mattered. What consumed you. What kept you up.

Names We Forget

I found names I hadn’t thought of in years. Business partners, collaborators, people I negotiated with, laughed with, argued with. Some of them I’d forgotten entirely until I saw them written in my diary.

And then there were the names of people who are no longer here.
That one lands differently. You see a name you haven’t thought of in a decade, and for a moment they’re as real as the road noise outside. Then you remember. And the moment passes, but something stays with you: a wish that you’d called more, visited more, said the things you meant to say before there was no more time to say them. The people still here start looking different after that.

I found a phone number for an old high school friend I’d lost touch with before everything changed. On an impulse I sent a text. She’s alive and well and we’ve been texting ever since, remembering moments from when we were 16.

Always Eyes Forward

There’s a particular kind of person who is always already somewhere else in their mind. Planning the next thing, fixing the next problem, filling in the next blank on the calendar. If you’re honest with yourself, you probably know that person. You may be that person. I tend to be that person.

Looking backward is not something they teach in business books. The whole architecture of ambition points forward. Next quarter. Next year. What’s the roadmap?

But those diary pages held something no roadmap ever could: proof of what I couldn’t see while I was in the middle of it. I found ideas I’d abandoned because the timing wasn’t right, and reading them now, I wondered if the timing might be right at last. I found things I’d spent years worried about that resolved themselves without my help. I found decisions I was proud of and decisions that still make me wince. I found a note, written in my own hand, from the first night I met Peter Trippi at a dinner at Fred Ross’s house. I had no idea in that moment what that one person would mean to the next two decades of my life as my editor and friend.

Worry Gave Nothing

Here is the thing that struck me hardest.

Page after page of anxiety. Concerns about money, about people, about decisions that felt enormous in the moment. Hours, probably weeks, probably months of cumulative worry spread across those pages like a weather system.

And the worry changed nothing. Everything worked out, or it didn’t. The outcomes arrived on their own schedule, indifferent to how much sleep I lost over them. Most of it was unnecessary drama.

There’s a verse that has been rattling around in my head since I closed the last diary. In Matthew 6:27, Jesus asked: "Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?" That’s not a rhetorical question. It’s a precise diagnosis. Worry is the activity of spending what you don’t have on a problem you can’t solve yet. And the ledger never balances.

If You’re Young

If you’re reading this in your 20s or 30s or 40s, here is the one thing I wish someone had handed me on a card: Start writing it down. Not for posterity. Not because anyone will read it. Because the act of recording a day forces you to see it. A diary is not a journal of feelings; it’s a ledger of your actual life, and someday you will want that ledger more than you can currently imagine. Plus it’s cathartic to write your thoughts daily.

The second thing: The people around you right now, the ones you see so often you’ve stopped really seeing them, are the ones you will one day search for in a contact list and find missing. You don’t need to do anything dramatic. You just need to be a little more present than you were yesterday. That’s the whole assignment.

And the third thing, the hardest one: The crisis consuming you this week almost certainly won’t make the highlight reel. Not because your problems aren’t real, but because most problems resolve themselves on a timeline that has nothing to do with how much you worry about them. Stop turning every problem into an unnecessary nightmare. You’re probably making it worse.

If You’re Further Along

If you’ve been at this for a while, the calculus shifts slightly but the math still works.

Go back and look. Pull out the old photos, the old files, the old notebooks if you kept them. Not to live there, but to mine them. I found ideas in my diaries that I abandoned because the timing was wrong, and reading them now I realized the time has finally arrived. Yours might be in there too: the thing you set down because life got loud, waiting for you to pick it back up.

And then call someone. Not text. Call. The person you’ve been meaning to reach for months, the friend you drifted from without any particular reason, the mentor who shaped you and probably doesn’t know it. The window is open right now. You don’t know how long it stays that way, and neither do I.

If there is something you’ve needed to say to someone, this is your reminder that later is not a date on any calendar.

A Few Good Actions

Beyond the calling and the writing, a few things that are worth trying.
Find one worry you’re carrying right now and ask yourself honestly: What would I tell a younger version of myself about this, looking back from 20 years out? The answer usually arrives faster than you expect, and it’s rarely "keep worrying." I can guarantee that most of my worry was wasted, but it takes a toll.

Find one idea you abandoned. Not to necessarily act on it, but to look at it again with the eyes you have now. Sometimes abandoned ideas weren’t wrong; they were just early.

And find one person, still living, who changed the course of your life without fully knowing it. Write them a note. A real one. The kind that takes five minutes and means 20 years.

The Road Continues

The road out there is loud and the curtains are thin and the dog needs to go outside. But before all of that: Consider what you are building right now that you will look back on.

Not the accomplishments. Not the revenue. The days themselves.

The names in the pages. The people who, without knowing it, are going to change everything. Because in the end, the people are all that matter. Everything else is just noise.

They deserve a little more of your attention than your worry does.

P.S. One More Thing

One of the things I found in my diary from 2010 was my first chance meeting with artists Kevin and Wanda Macpherson. That meeting led to a long friendship and some interesting collaborations since then.

And one more just happened: Kevin has decided to join my China trip this fall and is even willing to do some coaching and demos. I’m looking forward to spending a couple of weeks with him as we experience China.

And next Saturday I’m hosting my annual spring retreat in the Adirondacks — this year marks somewhere around 14 or 15 years of doing it. The origin story fits this week’s letter better than I planned.
I started the retreat because I was afraid my father’s lake home there would sell and I’d lose my reason to return. I remember praying, genuinely and specifically, that I’d somehow be able to buy it. It was beyond what I could afford, and I wanted it badly enough that I asked God to make a way.

He didn’t. Not that way.

After my father died and the opportunity finally came, I didn’t want it anymore. I had already found something that was a better fit for my family: simpler, older, more character, more ours. The prayer I thought I was praying wasn’t really about the property at all.

It was about the lake, the mountains. The colorful misty mornings.

The particular quality of light through Adirondack pines at 6 a.m. And most of all, the lake community.The people who keep showing up year after year no matter what, who have become something closer to family than friends. The house was never the answer. The answer was the connections I didn’t yet know I was building.

It’s late to join my Adirondack Publisher’s Invitational this year, but if you reach out, there may still be a seat. No promises. What I can promise is the next one: Fall Color Week, where we return to Acadia National Park for one of the most spectacular painting locations on earth. Find out more at www.fallcolorweek.com.

Who Is This Guy Eric Rhoads?

Eric Rhoads is the founder and publisher of PleinAir Magazine and Fine Art Connoisseur Magazine (both on newsstands nationally), author and host of six Art Marketing instruction videos, writes a blog on Art Marketing, and is the author of the Amazon bestseller Make More Money Selling Your Art. Additionally, he produces the weekly e-newsletters American Watercolor, Fine Art Today, Inside Art, PaintTube ArtNotes, Pastel Today, Plein Air Today, and Realism Today. Eric hosts the in-person Plein Air Convention & Expo, the Fine Art Trip for art collectors, and painting retreats including Paint Adirondacks, Fall Color Week, and the Winter Art Escape, as well as online virtual events Acrylic Live, Pastel Live, PleinAir Live, Realism Live, Watercolor Live Digital Painting Live, Gouache Live, and Art Business Mastery Day. He is also the producer of the PleinAir Salon Online Art Competition and art instructional courses through PaintTube.tv. Each weekday Eric hosts Art School Live, a YouTube show featuring free demos from a variety of artists, and he is host of the PleinAir Podcast and Art Marketing Minute Podcast. Eric is a plein air, landscape, and portrait painter with works at Castle Gallery. He is heavily involved in the radio industry as founder of Radio Ink Magazine as well as Radio + Television Business Report, the Radio Forecast Conference, and the Hispanic Radio Conference. He is the author of the bestselling book Blast from the Past: A Pictorial History of Radio’s First 75 Years. Eric lives in Austin, Texas, with his bride, Laurie, and they are the parents of triplets. Learn more at EricRhoads.com, or see Everything We Do.