I have recently read some very good books on productivity, focus, business ingenuity, perseverance. For all the wisdom bestowed, reality is that my get-up-and-go is off meandering through meadows of dandelions and daffodils. I should be writing, instead I just want to curl up and read about escaping to far-flung places.
That’s when it hit me, I have Spring Fever.
I recently came across a delightful piece in “The Kiplinger Magazine” that perfectly described the symptoms of my malady: Restlessness, Romanticism, and Just Plain Laziness. On the latter, the author writes:
“One morning you wake up wondering what’s happened to the old spark. You moon out the window instead of tackling the job at hand, yawn away the afternoon, make the obvious mistakes. The outdoors beckons, but once outside, you just lean against a tree and think lazily that really one day soon you must get at that spading. Meanwhile, ho-hum.”
I suspected that the writer had been spying on me, but given that this gem was published in 1951, I decided that was probably not the case.
Mark Twain knew it well when he wrote, “It’s spring fever. That is what the name of it is. And when you’ve got it, you want—oh, you don’t quite know what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!”
I’ll get back around to those more ambitious books another time, meanwhile Spring kicks off the baseball season. I’m not at all a baseball fan, but I was a Red Barber fan during those wonderful years when he was on NPR (may he RIP). “Rhubarb in the Catbird Seat” is a delightful slice-of-life reading, baseball enthusiast or not.
