The Luxury of Free Time

I’m sitting here writing this the night before you’ll be reading it, as is often the case with my blog. (No time to blog during lunches these days, so I have to get ahead during other free time.) And it occurred to me that, while I might feel very busy at the moment, in reality, I’m still blessed with two key things for happiness: some free time and the things I need to fill that time the way I see fit.

It helps that I don’t really have outrageous wants. I mean, when left to my own devices, the things I want to do are watch movies, read books, and write books–not necessarily in that order. Those things don’t cost much money. Netflix provides me with pretty much all the media I’d ever want to watch. Libraries get me books. And writing is free. Spending time with my family, also free.

Sometimes it’s too easy to forget the small simple things that lie underneath everything else I have going on in my life, and I just wanted to take a moment to recognize them. Taken as a whole, the life I lead is one that most people throughout history would be quite envious of, really. I mean, I’ve been to palaces and castles, and I’ve seen how the kings and queens used to live it up. They can keep it. I’ll take my air conditioning, my internet, my media, my family, and my nights and weekends where I get to do what I please.

Of course, as I wrote all this, I was feeling happy for my family, who got to go to the pool and swim for a while. And now in the middle of typing, I just heard from them: they swam for five minutes until another kid at the pool peed or pooped (both? details are sketchy) in said pool, and the whole thing got closed down for the rest of the day.

So I’m tweaking the moral of my post for today. Instead, it’s this: enjoy the small details that make life awesome, because you never know when you’re pool’s going to get pooped in. Words to live by, friends. Words to live by. (And bonus points to you if you get the connection between that moral and the picture for this post.)