The marker bag got packed up at the end of a multi-day conference last week. I capped the pens and rolled up the sheets. Headed for the car.

And I really should have felt super satisfied. Everything had turned out great. But then there’s this other feeling…

One thing about this kind of work, and maybe your kind of work too, is that it can somehow feel like it is never quite enough. You come off a big gig, a longer job, and instead of high-fives all around, the count in your head resets to zero. It’s on to maybe thinking about the next one. Or about booking the next one.

It’s kind of like running a race wher you can’t see the distance traveled while putting one foot in front of the other.

Was feeling a little bit like that after heading to the car following the conference, and even after getting home from it.

So I stopped and did a little thinking about that distance traveled. About what had happened in this race over the last many years of drawing.

My back-of-a-sketched-on-napkin math goes something like this. Boards run about eight feet across. On a full client conference of live event day, I fill four of them. Over the year, I do more than fifty of those jobs. It has been about eight years now.

Then I tried to add up everything else. The murals, the napkins and Post-its to coffeeshop baristas, bartenders, and airline hospitality folks. The from-the-pew drawings every Sunday at church. The sketches that go out as texts or up on LinkedIn and Instagram.

It comes to something like four miles of drawing over the last 6+ years.

Four miles!

That is roughly the distance from my front door to E.W. Beck's, the pub in the middle of our little town of Sykesville. And then it’s also the walk back if I had a couple of pints. If the sketches were laid out end-to-end, I could walk over them there and back.

That is how a body of work sneaks up. If I’m always looking at the blank sheet in front of me, or the next job on the calendar, then the distance behind stays invisible until I stop and turn around to count it.

And four miles is only the road so far. I get to take out the markers and pens, or pack this bag up again this fall and this winter and draw the line a little longer every time.

In the middle of your own long run? Wondering whether any of it is adding up? I would gently bet that it is. You have just been too busy running to measure it.

Grateful you are here,

Wade