Fear of Leisure
Nice pace you've got there . . .
Like a pile of cocaine, summer can inspire shocking greed. The other day I went for a midday walk and felt aggrieved because there are only six weeks left. Or maybe then there were seven.
Anyway: it took most of June to get my summer legs under me, and now that’s done and I only wish that it would go on forever.
The kids are well. My daughter is letting me read her The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in the evenings. This is big news as she has refused chapter books for a long time. I had to push it on her but now that she’s in, she’s really in. I am delighted. She needed a story with real intensity, if you ask me.
She and her friend held a lemonade stand at the friend’s house last weekend. They sold cookies too. They made twenty-five bucks. Her brother is all fired up about science experiments, engineering, and Arnold Schwarzenegger movies. His dad has let him watch Terminator, T2, and Kindergarten Cop. We built a pulley using a spool, a plastic takeout container, and some thread. The three of us walked to the creek one evening, where he collected a “water sample” and she mined out some quartz.
Both siblings are strangely alive with thoughts of Elon Musk. In his role as world’s richest man, he seems to function as a kind of reference point, an ultimate.
I hired two high school students from Poly to take care of the superabundant plant life on the side of my house. They did a beautiful job. My son surveyed it with me—you can now see and walk along a brick pathway that runs from front yard to back yard. My enthusiasm spurred Bobby to hypothetical thought. What if Elon Musk hired Arnold Schwarzenegger to mow his lawn?
I can’t answer that, but the thought of Arnold behind a push mower kind of made my week.
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I just want summer to keep going, y’all. I am picking away satisfyingly at my to-do list: the doctor’s appointments, the driver’s license renewal, the new phone—I’m p sure it’s been seven years—the car servicing. Soon I will have passport photos taken, dry clean the winter coat, and hang the curtains I bought eight months ago. If dealing with this stuff at a stately pace sounds boring, you have maybe never been an overwhelmed adult.
I take a lot of walks, like two to three a day. I began doing some school work, planning for next year. I am trying not to let it swamp me. The walks help, the way they break the day into sections.
On the advice of my ex, of all people, I have been attending Crossfit-style fitness classes at a nearby gym. I am loving them greatly. The low-stakes camaraderie; the bare-bones space itself; being made to do things I would never, ever attempt on my own; the sensation of getting stronger. I go to the 11:30 class and it, too, sections the day agreeably into two parts.
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Mostly, I think what I feel in this phase of summer is a delicate balance between the list-driven, goal-oriented life I am used to and a different mode, quiet yet juicy, something you might call living in the moment. I approach(ed) summer with a notion of Things I Want to Get Done, and also a hypothetical desire for a strange entity called leisure.
These aims don’t always coexist comfortably, but as the weeks of summer go on, the headspace changes, and it’s cool. I still have my list, but I savor the feeling of being drawn in new directions. I didn’t know that the new fitness class, which came out of wanting to deal with a musculoskeletal problem I have been dragging around with me for years, would lead to a bunch of reading up on the mind-body connection, and on posture, and I didn’t know how satisfying engaging in these (off-list!) pursuits would feel.
I love a list and a plan and a feeling of productivity, and I am only just beginning to appreciate how scary a true rest and a bunch of unstructured time feels to me. I am realizing that I equate unplanned time with “doing nothing” (in a bad, alarming way), and probably the ultimate fear is of falling apart. Maybe that fear, more than some objective “being busy,” explains why I often yearn for downtime but usually feel that I can never quite have it. This is an old feeling with me—it transcends having children, goes back at least to college if not earlier.
This is not to say that I have figured it all out or made some grand change, but that the exciting thing about summer right now is this sensation of playing around with my stance. To talk of living “at a slower pace” is a cliché; actually getting to do it is a subtle revelation.