One thousand is simultaneously a lot —and not very much at all. It really depends on what you are counting.

A thousand dollars can change someone’s life (or at least their month) but a thousand dollars is a rounding error in a corporate budget.

A thousand days is almost three years and time enough for almost anything to happen to the average person, but a thousand days is the blink of an eye in the scale of history and barely worthy of a moments thought.

A thousand words can tell an entire story, but a thousand words is little more than a few pages and a seeming drop in the bucket of a whole published novel.

I’ve been writing a novel this month and I tackle it in one thousand word chunks, simultaneously a lot of work to sit down and write and yet not very much at all.

But still —a thousand words, over and over and over again adds up.