"My life in the States slows down more each time I return from St. Cecilia. It worries me in a way.
"I worry it is because I am getting too old or too lazy or too something to get up every day and push harder, the way I did when I was younger. I find myself saying, 'Well, that's enough for today,' much more quickly than I used to. I worry that what I have done on some days — as a husband and a father and a neighbor and a writer — is not actually anywhere near enough.
"I have also observed that I am less willing to leave my house to go anywhere that is more than about ten minutes away. If I cannot find it or participate in it or discover it within that radius, I am inclined to forgo it all together. If you want me to travel farther than that, then it had better be good.
"I want to eat at the same few places, and I want to see the same few faces. I want there to be less filling up of my days and more letting the days just come and wash over me. I am less inclined to attack the day and more inclined to simply let the day have its way with me. I want to be sure I sit in the stillness and the see the show open in the morning and watch the show close in the evening from a quiet spot with a quiet heart.
"I expect there are equal parts fatigue and maturity, age and laziness all mixed in there somewhere. I also suspect that my priest and my psychiatrist and my publisher, not to mention my mother, would all tell me there was something else, something maybe even troubling, if I had the courage to ask their opinions. Though I know each of them, in his or her own way over the years, has told me clearly that one of the secrets of this adventure is to find one's way to being something at least as much as doing something. I trust that they have been right all along."
