Two Minutes, Just Two Minutes

A long time ago, when I worked for Amazon, they ran what is still for me the best ad campaign they've ever done.  There was a choir of middle aged men singing, "two minutes, just two minutes, I spent two minutes shopping for your gift..." among other awesomely corny tunes.

There's a theme there.  Yes, you can buy someone the perfect gift online in two minutes.  There are a lot of other things you can accomplish in two minutes.  Or fifteen...or twenty.  My point is that you don't need long periods of time to accomplish a lot.

I think I forgot this when I was home.  When time ceased to be a luxury.  In my previous working life, I could be a producer of epic proportions in the cooking and quilting departments.  Friends would ask me how and I'd just shrug and say "twenty minutes a day...just make a little bit of progress every day".

In The Happiness Project, the author espouses the "evening tidy up".  If you spend fifteen minutes at the end of the night doing this and that, tomorrow will be much easier to handle.  She's right.  Although sometimes, it's pretty hard to get motivated to do that fifteen minutes.

As you know, I have been struggling to take my daily project 365 photo since returning to work.  I discovered that I had missed about four days out of the last nine and at first I was really depressed about it.  Then I just picked up my camera and went outside (a life rule).

In and around my house, in about ten minutes, I took some really beautiful photographs and more than enough to fill the gap of the missing days.  From here until the end of the year, I cannot promise that a photo assigned to a day was actually taken on that day.  I will do my best, but I still plan to assign a photo to each day.  I just might take the majority of them on the weekend ;).

I uploaded, edited and organized the photos.  The next morning I woke up and two people (one a stranger) had tagged one of the ten minute garden photos as a favorite on Flickr.  Which is what inspired this post.  I didn't spend an afternoon looking for the right shots.  I spent ten minutes.  And quite by accident, I took one of my best photos ever.

My mom always tells me that with the parenting it isn't the quantity of time, it's the quality.  I don't have a quantity now, so I have to believe it's the quality.  Still, I miss taking them to school and picking them up...snuggling in the morning and chatting while chilling after school.  It's just not the same, but I think I'm starting to accept that.

Enough rambling...and now...here's that photo.  I hope you like it too.  I call it "emerging".  It's a sunflower in my garden that is less than a day from bursting open...maybe I'm getting close to opening too.