Over the years, I have slowly drifted away from one of my favorite pastimes: reading. As a young person, I was always reading. At any moment, you could frisk me and find a paperback in my purse. I’m not sure when that began to change, but certainly by my college years the trend was clear.
After working for decades, the joy of reading remained but the commitment to it had faded. The best I could do was read over my lunch break at work, a situation not all that conducive to deep thought or complex plot lines.
Nevertheless, books remained a constant in my life, even when I was mostly just dusting them.
With the onset of retirement, the first thing I’ve given myself is the pleasure of reading. It’s the first thing I do each morning, along with a couple of cups of coffee.
Sometimes I read for an hour, sometimes two. Now I don’t have to limit myself to short stories or easy reads. Now I can commit to those hardbacks too large to slip into my purse. Now I can spend hours drifting through the used book stores, planning the syllabus for the days and weeks to come.
Life will take new forms in the years to come, and it’s not yet clear what changes lie ahead, One thing is for sure, though. There will be a book at hand.