Finding Beauty in Unexpected Places, Day 7: An Hour Badly Spent

In Elizabeth Bishop's poem "One Art," she catalogs the losses in our lives from the mundane to the fantastical. She writes, "Lose something everyday. Accept the fluster / of lost door keys, the hour badly spent." Although I can be efficient with my time, I admit I can spend hours badly. And when I use my time inefficiently, all my graduate school training and my guilt complex (that should, quiet frankly, be studied) combine to make me feel like a horrible human being for wasting time.

This Thursday, I found myself with a couple free hours between my last meeting of the day and a performance I was going to that night. It was an odd amount of time; it made going back to North Liberty seem silly, but it left me with some free time in Iowa City. I knew what I should have done was go to a coffee shop and grade papers. But instead, I got my dinner, wandered around my favorite downtown shop, The Artisans' Gallery, and then wandered around the public library.

My childhood was spent wandering around the Willa Cather Public Library. I loved fingering the spines of books, crawling on the floor to look at the bottom shelf, and finding new books that unexpectedly caught my attention. In high school, my friends and I would go to the bookstore on a Friday night and repeat the same process there. Lately, it's felt like I've lost the ability to wander through a library or bookstore. When books become your work, you always have more books than you can read. It's hard to want more books when piles of library books have taken over your office. It has become hard for me to read for fun and not feel guilty when there are all these other books that I "should" be reading.

But given a free hour, I found myself falling back into old habits. In that hour badly spent, I rediscovered the joy of just browsing the stacks of books. I gravitated to the pet section that night and then curled up with a beautiful photography book that documented a puppy training program in a New Jersey Prison (all labs too!) and got some pointers for some of the training I hope to do with Sully this spring and summer. No, I didn't bring anything home, but it was a lovely opportunity to be intimate with books again - to see them as joy and not work. It made me want to renew that joyful connection - to read more for fun and to spend more time in libraries and bookstores instead of the more time efficient Amazon.com. So perhaps, in the end, it was not an hour badly spent at all.