In my old canvas L.L.Bean beach bag, which I keep at the ready in the backseat of my car, I’ve got my beach books at various stages of completion.
Right now, there’s my dog-eared copy of To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf which I re-read every summer, the remarkable memoir, Crying at H Mart, and The Crane Wife by CJ Hauser because I delude myself into thinking I might be able to write like her someday. I would also pack Robert Caro’s The Power Broker, but at 1,336 pages it would be like lugging around a cement block.
I read more in the summer than at any other time of the year. It’s a couple of unperturbed hours interspersed with plunges into the ocean, a couple of truly delicious hours when I’m not thinking that I should be thinking. And oddly enough, some of my best thinking happens then.
In the in-betweens.
It’s the big-picture stuff that floats to the surface. Where do I want to be a year from now? What kind of work makes me happy? Am I fulfilled? If I leap, will the net appear?
In other words–sorry–I get my head out of the sand.
You’ve gotta listen to your inner Minerva. You gotta let those unedited, unprompted, unplugged thoughts start doing a little happy dance of their own.
Yay, summer!
Once more to the beach, dear friends!
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