As I Was Saying…                           

I didn’t mean to go off on a tangent about Nauset Light like I did last night. I guess it was a memory I wanted to savor again, as I haven’t thought about the “I – love – YOU” light and the delight it brought my mother for a long time.

Thank you for taking that little detour with me.

What I originally intended to write about was the delectable experience of having days upon days to read a stack of books.

It’s been a long time since I’ve honestly experienced that freedom.

And the freedom I’m talking about is, when it comes right down to it, internal freedom.

It’s not as if I have any outside authority forbidding me from reading or restricting access to books. It’s my own judgment on where my time would best be spent.

I’ve been reading the same book (Come of Age by Stephen Jenkinson) for almost three months. That’s ridiculous, even for a slow reader like me. Granted, the prose is not light and breezy. It’s dense and ripe with perspectives that demand contemplation. It’s definitely not a summer ‘whodunnit.’ And I must admit, I’m enjoying the urge to ponder that this book engenders.

The truth is two-fold:

First, while I’m delighted that I’ve managed to write 244 consecutive daily blog posts, and I’m stoked that I’ve fallen into a reasonably predictable pattern of reliability, it’s also true that by the time I get everything written and ‘shared’ each evening, I only have the energy to read at most about two pages of my book before falling asleep mid-sentence. Given that the book is 388 pages, it’s no darn wonder I’ve been reading it for three months.

But the second truth is more damning.  The second truth is that the apparent lack of time to read I now experience as a result of my writing is baloney. I’m simply expressing in quite an obvious manner my disdain for my own self. I am the warden of my own ‘no time for reading’ jail.

And the irony is that I aspire to write. Therefore, I know that one of the greatest assets to my career is allowing myself to read copiously. So my resistance to permitting myself to return to those languid days of endless reading is not even logical from a practical perspective.

It’s just mean. Mean to myself.

Quite obviously, I need to reprioritize my life. I need to put reading and writing at the very top of my list. For as much as I’m asking myself to be kind to myself, it’s not easy.

My bedraggled copy – Photo: L.Weikel

(T-867)