Wisdom from Austin Kleon

Consider this a second installment of a “people I take time to read and listen to” series. I featured meditation teacher and writer Sebene Selassie on Monday. Today is Austin Kleon, an artist and writer I have written about in the past. I look forward to his Friday newsletter with its ten topics that could take a month to explore. He’s like the New Yorker of newsletters. I can never finish one magazine before another arrives.

I appreciate Austin’s work so much I took the step of becoming a paid subscriber. That means I get an additional email during the week where he muses on life, art and more. This week, he reviewed a dozen books he read this summer and described the guilt associated with being able to read during the day.

I resonated with these sentiments. While I renounced the notion of calling any reading a guilty pleasure, I do understand the idea of guilt at seeing some free time during the day and thinking, “I could read my book.” And then immediately imagining all the people I know who are toiling away at desks, in offices, online and feeling that pang that perhaps I *should* also be doing something other than “just reading”. Prior to retiring, even though I have worked from home for decades, I almost never read during the day unless it was professional literature. My work day mimicked that of the real world, and I felt as though I was cheating clients if I was engaging in hobbies during the day.

Now, however, as I explore this liminal space in which I am living, reading during the day is rapidly becoming part of the routine, both in the morning and in pockets throughout the day. It is all part of the increase in my reading mojo. I created a bookshelf bullet-journal style page and penciled in some of the titles I want to get to before the end of the year.

P.S. And now I *really* feel guilty as I realized the new season of the Great British Baking Show is available now on Netflix and the streaming has begun.

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