work and play

There is nothing wrong with guilty pleasures.
There is nothing wrong with guilty pleasures.
There is nothing wrong with guilty pleasures.

The coffee gurgles as I log in to facebook, update my pithy morning comments on the status line, make a quick check that the baby isn’t choking on a piece of cardboard, and dash off to the restroom for a the morning “constitutional.” Some things feel like habit. Other things feel like guilty pleasures. When the boundary of understanding between the two begins to dissolve, then I am spiraling into excess.

Back at the computer I sip on the coffee and peruse a Times article on Jung’s “Red Book” and find myself half fantasizing half imagining Jung as alternately mad man and Buddha, the Red Book a blend of the “Celestine Prophecies” and the Holy Grail. Is this fantasizing just me being self-indulgent? I scan my thoughts and decide “No” instead the author of the article has done his work. I am a believer. I have been swayed.

Why am I so concerned with the self-indulgent/over-indulgence? The answer rises from the gut. Everything seems so crazy right now: School, Work, New Home, Old Home, Life. I am fearful of self medicating. Of letting my guilty pleasures become full on distractions that keep me from feeling the reality of the moment. There is nothing wrong with a face book status line that makes me chuckle. Nothing wrong with a sliver of chocolate or even the whole damn bar washed down with a beer. It is when I do these things at the expense of everything else that I know I have disappeared down the rabbit hole. I am in la-la land.

I want to play.

G. and S. have taken to locking themselves in their room for long hours playing Polly pockets and Barbie’s. Play for children is essential. It is the rehearsal for adulthood. Play for adults is good too. The micro-vacation of the mind that allows us to get back on that horse where “horse” is a cubicle or a factory job or long hours pent up at home with small children, or the frustration of no job and no home. I want to play, I just don’t want to play all of the time.

Sometimes work feels like play, especially as I am struggling to turn my passion into my job. How to make money and surviving doing something you love? That is the question, isn’t it? But even then, work can feel work. I mean, its work, isn’t it. It isn’t play. Its just that, when you make play work, the temptation is to make play into everything, and that just doesn’t work.