I meant to go to yoga this morning. I adjusted my schedule to accommodate, I had every intention of attending, the mat was already in the car… but when my eyes opened and my brain engaged, my body took over the agenda, burrowing deeper into the covers and saying, Naaaah.
As I lay there, effectively checking out on commitments only I knew I was breaking, I got that faint taste in my mouth, that sweet hint of forbidden fruit. Maybe you’re not like this but I’m part shark: if I’m not moving, I’m dying. So the idea of simply laying there, glorying in the inactivity, felt both liberating and guilt-inducing. It wasn’t always this way.
Growing up in a small mountain town, admittedly many years ago, we kids took ourselves to doctor and dentist appointments on Columbia Avenue, then went on to school with tardy notes in our pockets. There was something tinglingly illicit about being on the town streets alone, with all the other kids in school, as if this was a chance to spy on the secret lives of adults. What did they get up to when they weren’t being our parents?
I vividly remember strolling leisurely past the corner store, past the butcher and the baker, past the pharmacy and the jewelry store, the photography studio and the bank, before crossing the street to the dentist. The sounds of the streets were different than what I was used to, travelling in herds of other kids. It was quieter and more purposeful; serious commerce and domestic engineering was being undertaken, not frivolous childhood. Adult conversations were being had as if they too were taking a break from their quotidian lives.
In the baker’s window there were always fresh loaves, unsliced, flashing their crusts out of the open ended white paper bags in which they were displayed and sold. Five loaves for $1.
Outside the SuperValu, two women, wearing car coats and headscarves (such was the fashion then), leaned close to each other over their respective shopping carts, alternating exhaled stories and opinions I could only guess at. Other adults came and went from storefronts and random unidentified doorways; no one paid me any mind or asked me why I wasn’t in school. It was entirely normal to encounter unaccompanied children from time to time, in the middle of the morning.
In my memory of those time-out days, it is always sunny and cool, different from the dusty, sunbaked empty streets of summer, when everyone has gone to the lake and even the main street is deserted, the butcher and baker having closed for vacations or long weekends. Those childhood days were endless, the light lasting until long after bedtime. We had no real commitments, no schedules or obligations. We just were. Little humans being, not doing.
For a brief time this morning, I had that same weightless feeling, that my commitments and obligations were optional, that I had agency over my time, that it’s okay to be skipping out. The body craved what the brain hadn’t anticipated, that delicious taste of personal freedom.
Until next time, cut yourself some slack. The world will wait.
Bruno Mars won’t call today.
