The Overwhelming Potential of the Weekend

I have a son who thinks the most perfect Saturday imaginable is one spent entirely in his pajamas. I can remember how much I used to love Sunday afternoons after church when I could spend hours with a Sunday paper scattered across the floor into two somewhat organized piles of the sections I had read and those I had not yet read with another pile for the slick-paper inserts from which I had rescued the comics and Parade. I'm not sure I could spend hours with any Sunday paper I've seen lately without pharmaceuticals being involved.

I kind of like my kid's approach. I look around and weekends are becoming more and more like the other five days. A headlong rush of things that have to be done--not to mention that many of us spend at least part of a weekend working in these stressed, job poor times. Boy, wouldn't it be great to just decide to spend those Saturdays--especially these daylight-starved winter ones--in your pajamas? Maybe get a stack of magazines and pile them up around you in the floor and just read and sip on coffee.

I also look at this and think about how hard it is to write in such a world as ours. Now I'm not stranger to "get it out" writing as I spent lots of times in the newsrooms of daily newspapers. Life on the city desk of any daily newspaper is not a place of reflection and time spent lost in thought. But, even then, we had cycles as we didn't have the ever-present Internet that can be filled at any time with new copy. No, we had deadlines, editions and we days that closed out when final edition came off the press. Then it was time to breathe, think about what you had accomplished, read the product of your hard work and move on. But that is gone with today's world and I wonder if writing hasn't suffered much for it. Good writing requires a little bit of "soak time" to get the words out as you want them to be. While I'm not a slavish writer who goes through draft after draft--that's obvious enough from reading my work--I'm also noticing more and more that my writing is suffering at the hands of e-mail and instant communication. I fail all too often to actually go back and read what I wrote. And rare is the time when I set aside a piece of work and return to it with fresh eyes and a mind chilled from the fevered moments of creation. There's no time.

So, look at that weekend not as something to be filled in but, rather, as something to be lived in. Like a pair of comfortable pajamas. And, when you write, it's not a race to fill in that screen--or page if you're old-fashioned like me.