Lesson of the Day

The lesson the day today is this: If you get up in the morning and run eight miles before breakfast, you are absolutely allowed to go ahead and feel pleased and proud with how the day is starting. You can even, if you wish, congratulate yourself on just how productive you are, what with eight miles run before you've had a meal. However, you should not labor under the delusion that you will actually do anything else at all that day. You will not. You will have your breakfast and think about lunch and take a long shower and, if there's one to feed, feed your dog. You will not write a conference paper. No matter how enthusiastic you feel about the possibility of a productive day kicked off by an eight mile run, you should not think that the eight mile run will be the beginning of bigger, greater things. It will, instead, be the last thing you do all day, and you might want to consider whether you need to do anything else. Because if you do, you might want to do those things before you run eight miles or schedule the run for another day. Because when it's over, it's over, and there's nothing to be done about it.