in defence of pleasure
yin, yang
I took my 10 year old cousin to the ballet last night and she asked me: what do you do in your free time? I told her a long list of balanced activities, each one symbolizing a pillar of my life I had so proudly curated and tended to over the years. Exercise. Knowledge. Creation. Social time. I noticed as I shared my answer that I was pretty pleased with it, content with how dynamically I spent my time these days.
I then asked her the same question. She shrugged and said, “Reading, mostly.”
Her simple answer took me back to a time where my answer had been the same: a time when if I wasn’t doing school work or gymnastics or socializing, I was probably reading. I loved reading, I looked forward to it. It was an Event. At some point, that narrative changed and reading started to feel like something I Had To Do to be smart or use my time well, which reduced the natural joy I had always gotten from just doing it for pleasure. Making it something I had to do didn’t quite allow it to be something I got to do in the same way.
This backwards narrative was reflected back to me in the clear eyes of my cousin who was excitedly telling me how she was going to reread the Harry Potter books she had finished two years ago just for fun. It made me reflect on when the last time I properly reread a book was just because I felt like it, and how a part of me still vestigially viewed doing so as somehow unproductive, not a good enough use of my time or attention, which then limited my ability to enjoy doing so, for I had an imposed an implicit judgement on myself as I did. But here was a clear, unconditioned mind just glimmering with the joy and enthusiasm we all feel when reading something we love staring back at me—and it made me wonder: when did I start treating reading as a chore, instead of the precious pleasure it actually is?
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