It is Sunday afternoon. I am parked outside the library, waiting for it to open, and I have a long wait ahead due to a miscalculation. I'm not too upset. I am warm and dry inside what Mark and I like to call our "temperature-controlled metal box". Have you ever thought about how amazing the common wonder known as a car truly is?
The pointy green heads of a tulip clan are basking joyfully in the rain. They are out there getting soaked while I am perfectly comfortable on the other side of a window. I suspect they don't much mind.
This is what I am subject to as a writer: a constant hyper-awareness of my situation. It is borderline unhealthy. How sweet it would be to back in simple, unfettered enjoyment of a cozy afternoon, but I'm not sure that my life will ever be that straightforward.
I had a couple of days last week that were pleasant to an absurd degree. One included an afternoon spent with a friend and her sweet baby daughter. After taking my leave I drove with the breeze of a perfectly gentle spring day circulating through open windows to pick up Mark from his very long day at work. We went home and barbecued in our backyard, jointly brainstorming and preparing our meal. We appreciated for the first time how much longer the days have sneakily become. I thought over and over how much I wanted to preserve the full goodness of the evening. I wondered repeatedly if I could write something that would accurately encapsulate the full beauty that had been handed to us.
And another day: I spent hours on the front porch reading a book in bare feet and warmed by the sun. I got three letters in the mail that day from real people. I had a much-needed phone chat with a dear friend who, curiously, is also my cousin.
All of this goodness, and no way to bottle it up! No way to replicate the rain tapping the windshield as I am filling a page in this notebook. I felt guilty repeatedly in the happy moments of last week, and am still fighting the feeling now - it must be so wrong, I tell myself, to be robbed of full enjoyment by a writer's instincts - you have to record this! my instincts tell me. You have to write this down!
I'm evaluating. I'm considering the true effects of these impulses, and the truth of the matter: they bring deep enjoyment. My instincts are what drive me to notice even very tiny reasons for joy.
It has been several years now since Mark and I went to see a Sherlock Holmes movie on Christmas day (which was when I learned that this practice, of movie-going on Christmas, is not only something people actually do, but that they do in droves; I had no idea).
Late in the movie Sherlock dances with a beautiful woman at a party. He is clearly distracted. "What do you see?" she asks him.
The camera follows his gaze for a few seconds, darting from person to person, taking in voices, movement, color, light. He replies, "Everything. That is my curse."
It is heavy, all-consuming, never-ending, but to see everything, though it is not easy, is not a curse - I thought so for a while, but I'm coming around. It is an attitude of living that can be robust and gratifying.
It is the simplest description I have encountered of what it is for me to be a writer.
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