Complete and utter idleness consumed me on the Cape this weekend. And not the kind of idleness where guilt is the overriding theme, because every ounce of fret and worry that envelops my working week and twisted life was left on the Northern side of the Sagamore Bridge last Friday night... caught in the webs and nets that hung from its rafters... abandoned like the construction there.

And I was free.

Free to slow my daily whirl to a screeching halt, lose track of the thoughts that pester me in the middle of the night, and swim inside of books and people and a vast expanse of azure skies. Leisure took hold and refused to let me think outside the Now... my expectations rendered useless, wilting from lack of proper attention. The relaxation was overwhelming. Even now, back in my untidy apartment, returning my things to their original habitats and making coffee to ice for a week's worth of mornings, things are moving slowly. In my mind I'm back under the nearly-full moon over Forest Beach with the cool sand between my toes. And what can be stressful about that?

On my postcard from Thailand, Jim wrote about living in his bungalow on the beach in Koh Samui: his walks into town in the evening; his days full of swimming, reading, and recovering from the night before. He told me of the people he'd met that had been living a similar lifestyle for months but that it was hard for him to imagine that much leisure. And it got me thinking about the fine line between life and leisure, how mutually exclusive the two sometimes seem, and how difficult it is to marry them in my mind.

Just before I moved to Boston to take my place within the first stringent working weeks of my life, there was another television commercial, this time for Discover Card. It featured an instrumental version of "Fly Me to the Moon" and the image of a man and a woman driving in a convertible car on a winding, sunlit road. The voice-over said, "Ten days of vacation. Twelve holidays. Fifty-two Saturdays. Fifty-two Sundays." And it hit me: this is what my life was going to be reduced to from this point forward for as far into the future as I could imagine. I swallowed hard and began to dream of ways to unseal this fate. And I'm still dreaming.

How do we capture those stray moments that fall into the cracks of our lives? Five whole days pass while I pray for speedy deliverance into the weekend. The anticipation of an upcoming vacation absorbs months of imagination. The majority of a year is spent separate from the kind of calm and contentment that I experienced this weekend. And I expend small, quiet, candle-lit moments, like this one, wondering why.

How was your weekend?