I'm no Chris Brogan

If you are not already an avid reader of Chris Brogan's blog, or don't know who he is, I highly recommend a daily dose of Chris (you can sign up for e-mail alerts that send his most recent post to your inbox). I nearly always walk away with a new idea or confirmation of something I have an opinion of. Sometime he helps me to articulate an argument I've had trouble finding the right words for when talking about social media. For instance I love this wonderful "apple tree" analogy:

Focus on the Relationship – to me, the new unit of business should be relationships. You get more fruit from an apple tree if you nurture it and pick apples when it’s ripe, instead of uprooting the tree and forcefully shaking the apples into your barrel.

I plan on ripping this off the next time I get called in to explain why it is taking so long to grow our list and why I don't just want to rent an e-mail list.

Great stuff, no?

But the reason I'm no Chris Brogan or Seth Godin or Beth Kanter is that my poor blog is not the central mouthpiece of my work. Sadly, my blog is like the plants in my house...if only they would whine or at least meow, they would have a much better chance of surviving.

This past two weeks has been a blur of natural disasters and sick kids and even giving them the attention that was due was an exhausting feat.

But it hammers home the point...you can't have it all (and to quote Steven Wright, "where would you put it?") Time is an ethereal luxury. You can neither stop it, nor control it.

Embrace it. Enjoy it. Focus on the most important thing in your life at that moment. For me, sometimes it's the knowledge that millions of people were suddenly left homeless due to the unrelenting series of disasters in the Asia-Pacific region and sometimes it's the feverish cry of a small child who needs you to drop everything and just sit with him.

And that's okay. In the grand scheme of things, the blog can wait.

Stay tuned...