Someone asked me at a dinner party what I do for fun and I could not answer.
Not because I had nothing to say. Because I had not been asked that question in so long that I had lost track of the answer. Fun had not been a category I was tracking. Pleasure had not been a budget line. The things I did outside of work were recovery, were maintenance, were the minimum necessary investment in the body and the relationships that kept the machinery running so I could go back to the work. Fun is what you do when you are not preparing for something. I had always been preparing for something.
I said: I walk. I like to walk.
Which is true. But it is also the safe answer, the answer that sounds like a hobby without requiring me to have thought about it, the answer that asks nothing of me in the way that a real answer would ask something of me, would require me to know myself well enough to say: this is what brings me joy, this is what I do not because it is useful but because it feeds something in me that nothing else quite feeds the same way.
I am working on the real answer.
I am taking it seriously the way I took my work seriously, which is the only way I know how to take things. I have signed up for the ceramics class I said I would do for fifteen years and never did. I have started reading novels again, slowly, without the guilt that used to accompany any reading that was not directly relevant to the thesis or the course prep or the committee work. I am learning that the novel is not procrastination. I am learning that the afternoon spent on a novel is not an afternoon I failed to use.
I liked painting once. When I was young, before I learned that my time was for other things. I am thinking about painting.
I am thinking about what it means to make something with no deadline attached to it, no evaluation, no rubric, no one waiting for it to be done. To make something just to see what comes out. To not know yet whether I am any good and to make it anyway, for the making itself, because the making itself turns out to be the point.
I am learning to have hobbies like a person who deserves them.
I think that is what I am actually doing with the ceramics class.
