In a recent post I suggested a question to ponder to start the new year: What have you been meaning to do for a long time that you haven’t done?
I went on to explain that it was meant in a light way to provoke small shifts in your world, i.e. new knobs for a cabinet or getting a print framed. At the end of the post, I even answered the question for myself – what I want to do is read Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. I wondered what it might inspire or if it would just seem like a satisfying item to check off a mental list.
Since that written assertion, I read about 50 pages of Anna Karenina to begin the year. I was excited to nestle into my couch with a cup of hazelnut coffee and dig in. As I turned each page, it increasingly felt like a ‘should’ instead of something I wanted to do. What I really desired was one of those reading experiences where you get lost in the book, absorbed into the world the author has created, sidelined from doing anything else because you can’t put the darned book down.
So I put down the Tolstoy and opened a book of essays I’d received as a gift for the holidays. I got lost in the book, absorbed into the world the author created, sidelined because I couldn’t put the book down.
Presto. Wish granted. I was like my own personal genie.
Life is too short to keep reading something I don’t want to read in that moment. Especially when there are so many books I can’t wait to read. I’ve already had two more gifted to me that arrived in the mail last week. What a rush. Let me at them.
I live riveted to enjoying literature, art, music, film. Whatever that means to me. It entertains and delights but also opens me to new ways of seeing the world. I love that.
But this extends to a lot of other things in our lives, doesn’t it?
If there’s something we’ve been meaning to do and we give it a whirl, some kind of shift occurs. It can spur growth, enrich us, make our environment more aesthetically pleasing, or it can allow us to focus our energy on the next thing.
So when I put down Anna Karenina and devoured the next book, I experienced a whole new writer and her perspective. But I also pushed through my need to keep doing something that feels like a ‘should’ when it’s supposed to be a leisure activity. I’m all for stick-to-itiveness and I’m actually really good at it in most areas of my life.
But sometimes I think we can remind ourselves that living riveted to ‘shoulds’ isn’t noble or necessary. I know sometimes I need to lighten up. If that means putting a half-finished book aside and moving on to another, why not? The alternative is to keep reading the classic, slowly and reluctantly, and delay getting to something that might be more fruitful and nourishing.
What have you been meaning to do for a long time?
Apparently I’ve been meaning to learn how to enjoy the heck out of my leisure time, all of it.
By Nancy Colasurdo
