For a few short months I have time to daydream. I got sick, again, and this time a course of antibiotics and a week in bed wasn't enough to fix anything. Months later, and an hour spent in the grocery store is a big accomplishment for my day. Three hours in a museum is like running a marathon. It's okay. Things are getting better. It's kind of a gift, actually.
A gift because out of these daydreams has come the desire to draw (I am up to drawing a parrot - you start with a circle for the eye), the interest in trying new things for no other reason than to try them, a long lost affinity for the ridiculous that I half believed I would never see again. It's given me time to look at the underbelly of doubt I have been hiding about what I am doing and why I am doing it.
In a couple of months I return to my Master's degree, if I don't run off to art school before then. It's a temptation. But if I do go back, I go back as someone who will take what she is doing very seriously, and not seriously at all. I don't know how to explain it better than that. I hope to keep my capacity for daydreaming and, rather than see it as an indulgence, to see it as as a source of the imagination, a place (to paraphrase John Updike) for the spirit to rest. Life's hard enough without willfully leaving out the best parts.
To put all that another way: I have enough. I happen to be alive. End of discussion. - Maira Kalman
