Here’s the issue with “reality” television:

It takes an inordinate amount of footage to put together a one hour episode. The bulk of the time producing a show is cutting out all the boring parts and leaving just the exciting bits.

Then there’s the direction involved to lead people to feel a certain way about a situation or the people on it (again, even more editing involved).

We then compare an episode with what’s going in our own lives and we seem so boring as a result.

This is then compounded by social media where people are only posting fragments of their lives, but only those exciting ones, giving us the impression that is the entirety of their life.

Real life is slow.

It’s boring.

Drama doesn’t get resolved in a season. In some situations, it never gets resolved.

Real life is also messy and chaotic.

Sometimes you need to back away and refocus.

Heeding the advice of a writer I admire and follow, Dean Wesley Smith, he told me the only excuse for stopping your writing is kids. You can come back to your writing, but you can never get the time back with your kids.

He wasn’t kidding.

The days with them have been long, but the years are short. One of them is off to school next year and I’m doing my best to honour a promise I made that if I became a parent that I would be a present one.

It doesn’t mean it’s glamorous, but it’s hard some wonderful moments.

But it takes time to get to those moments because it’s the boring parts between the highlights that make the highlights happen.

Boring isn’t bad and we need to remember that.