But really the thing that feels good is LOSING time

 Re: the summer reading challenge thing, and time.

I was talking yesterday with a talented and insightful poet friend about time.  She has a great poem which I read as about how we perceive quantities of time as enough or too little.

It made me think about time's elasticity, and about something I once read about the uterus, or maybe actually it was about the vagina: pictured in textbooks as hollow, that space is not rigidly circumscribed (vagina like a hose, uterus like a melon), but is squishable, flexible, more like an uninflated balloon: there's only space in there if something makes the space, if something stretches the walls apart from each other.

What! You are thinking.  Why am I reading about the female reproductive system??

Gentle reader, sorry.  But isn't time uterine?  

It seems to be firmly circumscribed  (years, months, days, hours, minutes, seconds) but really its walls collapse and touch each other, or expand apart if something stretches them?

There's a lot more to be said about time.

In terms of the summer reading, I am now deep into Deepti Kapoor's Age of Vice.  

A couple of days ago, I had my first experience in many years of taking welcome refuge in reading a novel.  I went to it to hide from other tasks, and I spent time there that felt restorative.  I lost time.  I did not count the minutes, or think about them.  I read until I felt recuperated enough to tackle other parts of my day.

Being released from the work clock, and from the clock of child care really helped.  I felt like I was in a warm honey flow of the day, not wearing a watch. 

What a relief.

The summer reading challenge is about focus, but describing it by rigid time and as an exercise in sustained concentration both also make it effortful. (Yes, sometimes effort is needed.  I am not necessarily opposed to effort.  However... ) 

My realization of the last few days in which I have been reading a lot, with pleasure, without pressure, and with a sense of imaginative dreaminess and physical restoration is that this state lets me escape time, and that feels great.  It feels like much sought ease.  It feels like luxury.

I don't want a Rolex, I want to feel like I have slipped time's noose.

Ideally, reading fiction gets me there.