Lead, Kindly Light

It’s a quiet, lazy Memorial Day afternoon.  

I woke up around 10am, then lounged around in bed reading Samuel G. Freedman’s “Small Victories,” a third-person memoir of a teacher’s struggles to fight for her students’ futures in New York City’s blighted Lower East Side in the late 1980s and early 1990s.  I whiled away a couple hours, engrossed in the stories spun and woven in the paperback’s aged and ruffled pages.  It has been a long time since I’ve been able to read through, in a single day, 125 pages of something unrelated to work.  It’s a good feeling.

After munching on some Chicken-in-a-Biskit crackers (savory munchies reminiscent from my childhood), I went out for a walk along the river to the track as Rascal and our friend ran to the track to clock in a few laps in the summer sun.  Then we came back and Rascal made heavenly omelets with onions, tomatoes, avocadoes, garlic, and ham, and I made Belgian waffles.  We topped it off with berry-pineapple smoothies and freshly-cut watermelon before settling into a quiet afternoon lazing around in the living room.

And so it goes… this is the life of a homebody professional who happens to have a long weekend off.  It is, in many ways, the life I have often longed for: quiet, peaceful, steady, predictable, humble.  I take great joy in sitting on a blue beanbag, leaning against an open window, with the sun streaming onto my shoulders and hands.  I live so much of my life in a big blur, in a hurried rush to get from point A to point B to point C, to sleep, so that I can get up in the morning and get to point A once again.  This weekend is a chance to truly rest and relax and just be.  In many ways, I think this is how my life was meant to be lived.

But somewhere inside, I feel a silent nagging.  I’m not sure why.  Maybe it’s because I feel a little guilty for enjoying myself, since I’m not really serving anyone through this lazy afternoon.  Along those lines, maybe it’s because I fear that I’m sinking into a suburban mindset that basks in its own comforts without concern for the suffering in worlds not-so-far from here.  Maybe it’s because I feel nervous that days like this will be few and far between, and that the calm–however tinged with ambivalence–I feel today won’t revisit for a long while.  

Or maybe it’s a little of everything.