Day Dreaming

(I should preface this post by stating that Day Dreaming was first published in a literary journal in Winter 1999.)

The ability to pass time gracefully is an art that makes idleness attractive. Recently I was housebound and largely immobilized for two weeks recovering from surgery for a bone spur. Happily, I was well prepared to endure the inactivity. While some may have chafed at the enforced leisure, I enjoyed these doldrums.

Good habits, we are told, are learned in childhood. So are bad habits, and thus it was that in childhood I learned the pleasures of passing time by doing nothing. To appreciate this skill, one must understand that idleness is as much a state of mind as it is an absence of activity. The essential requirement is a shameful surrender to nothingness. Day dreaming, with its misty, evanescent, self-hypnotic qualities fits that definition. Self-serving and self-indulgent, it is perfect comfort for one's privations.

More Later, Joe