A few days ago, I found myself spending the afternoon in bed with one of my favorite Norton Anthologies. I wasn't feeling that great, and I had even gotten a lot done earlier that day, but I still managed find a way to start feeling guilty about it.
As I flipped through the pages and soaked in the afternoon sunlight, streaming in from the window across that recently laundered white bed spread that I love so much, a question came to the surface of my mind and made me feel badly.
Is this really my life?
The truth is that sometimes I feel like I should be doing more.
I work six days a week, for only four or five and a half hours at a time. This means that sometimes, I think I'm working a lot more than I really am. When I finish up my day and come home at noon, it often seems like I deserve a break. Even if I don't.
But sometimes, I'll go running. Sometimes I clean the apartment. Sometimes I spend hours in front of the computer, getting important work done. And yet, sometimes you can find me sitting comfortably in bed in the middle of an afternoon with a book in my lap and my worn old teddy bear in the crook of my arm. And guilt sometimes seems like a waste of energy.
Because, those moments spent alone with good reading? William Carlos Williams may have been talking about plums, but he was right when he wrote, "
Forgive me, they were delicious." And I don't think he was really that sorry. Neither am I.
Yes, this is really my life.
