Hello Reader,

My son turned a year older this week — a little deeper into his teens, a little closer to the door. The house has been quiet most of the month, the kids off living their own summer, my wife and I rattling around in the early draft of a life we'll be living full-time before long.

So maybe it's no accident I've had an old Jim Croce song stuck in my head: Time in a Bottle.​

Croce wrote it in 1970, the night his wife told him she was pregnant. He was three jobs deep and one record away from quitting music, and the news of a son sharpened his sense of time — made it suddenly precious, suddenly scarce. So he wrote a song about wanting to save it. To catch the days and keep them. To bank the hours against a future where there'd finally be enough.

Here's the part that's haunted me since I was old enough to understand it. Three years later, Croce was dead. A plane crash, thirty years old, one day before his next record came out. He never saw the song reach number one. He didn't get the decades he was saving for. The man who wrote the most famous song about saving time ran clean out of it.

And I think it's beloved precisely because it was wrong about its own premise. You can't put time in a bottle. The bottle doesn't hold. That isn't a tragedy Croce stumbled into — it's the truth the song is quietly built on. You can't save time. You can only spend it. The only question that matters is whether you spent it on what you'd have chosen, had you known the count.

That's the difference between productivity and the older thing I keep chasing. Productivity is the bottle — the promise that if you're efficient enough now, you can store time up and cash it in later, with the people who matter, once things settle down. Croce is the rebuttal. There is no guaranteed later. There's a child in front of you, a year older this week, and the hour you have with him now is the only one that's yours.

He couldn't keep the time. But the love he poured into three minutes of song outlasted his whole short life. That's the trick, I think. You don't save time. You fill it so fully that its passing stops being the point.

The Final Flicker

The bottle was always going to break. What you get to decide is what's inside it when it does.

See you later,
Mike

P.S. This isn't the first time a song taught me something I couldn't have reasoned my way to. Music runs all through the book I've been writing — songs do a lot of quiet work in Productiveness — because some truths about time only seem to arrive set to a melody. More on that as August arrives but sign up here for updates. (For now, this one's just between us and Jim.)

Thanks for reading. Your time is valuable, and I don’t take it for granted. In a world pulling us in all directions, thanks for choosing The Lantern.