My borrowed life of weekday leisure
Tuesday, June 12, 2012 at 10:20AM 
A couple of weeks ago at lunch at the deYoung Museum with my mother-in-law after we’d taken in the so-good Jean Paul Gaultier exhibit, I was struck by how many people there were in the museum restaurant. The place was packed. There were tables full of people all around us and outside in the middle of a warm Thursday, and not all of them retirees, a din of happy voices rising. People my age and younger, too, all at a museum in the middle of a weekday. I asked myself my usual question at times like these:
Who are these people who get to do this?
Maybe you know who I mean. Or hell, maybe you are one of those people who equally wonders about people like me in my former incarnation: me racing against the clock, for example, to make a haircut appointment on a weekday, watching the minutes tick by on my watch, knowing I only have an hour and then I have to throw myself back into the job. Maybe you’re one of those people sitting in the sun outside the café with your laptop, sipping a cappuccino from a big brown saucered cup, a dog at your feet, snoozing. Me? I’m in and out of the café, bam bam bam, ordering coffee to go, speaking fast, clipping pleasantries in the interest of time, heels clicking quickly across the floor to get me next door and into the salon chair for my allowed time away from the oxygen-sucking pull of my stressful job. And when I come out, hair freshly did, you’re still there with your face turned up toward the sun, thinking, breathing, sitting.
Two weeks ago, I was one of you.
Two weeks ago I was there, middle of the week, exhilarated and having lunch at the museum. My good fortune at being among The Lucky Masters of their Own Time during the Week thrilled me deeply, even as I knew it couldn’t last. Still, it was sweet to have this peek into a life I feel like I’m borrowing right now, a life in which an inspiring mid-weekday no-rush museum stroll and lunch were possible, me who has spent the last 20 years of my life pushing against deadlines at a j-o-b 5 days a week, then punching my way through a To Do list in the two days of the weekend.
There just seems to be something so wrong with how I’ve been working all these years, something fundamentally wrong at its core. But I wonder:
Is it the work or is it me?
Why have I worked so hard? I mean, OK, I look around my house and garden now that I’m here ALL the time unless company comes or someone drives me around, and I know full-well that all of this that I see is the result of having worked so damn hard: the mortgage paid, the college tuition paid, the nest emptied, the treasures accumulated on travels and at home. The glory of the garden is also the result of work, but that’s different. That never feels like work as much as it does like play, like letting go and flowing along in a doing-ness that is so pleasurable and relaxing.
I am all about that kind of work, work that is an expression of joy, work that is fundamentally art.
That’s what’s been so wonderful about this break: it’s been so creative in so many ways, whether it’s starting seeds in the garden, making lip balm or apricot jam, or reading and writing to my heart’s content. Or laughing with friends on a Tuesday afternoon, sitting in the shade of the patio-umbrella while the squirrels chase each other through the trees and across the rooftops. Just being here has been such a deep exhalation, followed by a deep inhalation, one after another, slowly, wide-eyed and grateful. It has been like a vacation but better: deeply, deeply curative. And of more than my back, really. Much more than that.
Having had this break, having had this peek into this blissful existence, I can’t see myself ever going back to how things were before.
I never wanted to be a Stay At Home Mom, but right now I’m deeply longing to be a Stay At Home Writer and Stay At Home Farmer and Stay At Home Curator of my own beautiful life.
I’m not proposing a life of leisure, far from it. I want a life of meaningful, playful, creative work. That is how I’m engineered. I couldn’t be any other way if I tried.
So this time has been, REMAINS, so precious. To be engaged in meaningful, playful, creative work on a daily basis, 7 days a week for 6 whole weeks. I think it’s been the final step in the Break-Up with Crazy that started in 2011, except that this time I’m breaking up with my former crazy work-style, with this idea I had of what I had to do to survive, to cover our overhead, to take care of my family. I’m not sure that’s so real anymore, but I’m still figuring it out.
Maybe something will come to me at the museum today over lunch with my mother in law, at the Cult of Beauty exhibit at the Palace of the Legion of Honor, when I take my place among The Lucky Masters of Their Own Weekday Time for a bit, reveling in it while it lasts. What delicious freedom!
Reader Comments (3)
so
much
DITTO
I highly recommend joining the ranks of The Lucky Masters of Their Own Weekday Time creative class! Life is too short to work a jive job for chump change.
DITTO. Who would have thought that getting laid off was a blessing.