It Is all Daytime TV

Ten Ways I Watch Daytime TV

Are You Watching?

Instead of doing my work, I sit on the sofa and watch daytime TV. A friend recently suggested that I watch daytime TV. Using the analogy of having to go into the fields each day and work, he pointed out that I’m calling in sick. The hard work necessary for the harvest, necessary to sustenance, necessary to kindling and keeping the fire of life burning is pushed aside. Rather than going into those (metaphorical) fields and doing the work that beckons me, instead of following my creative nudges and my call to write, I am watching daytime TV. I scoffed, and in my usual posture of “I’m so much better than daytime TV,” noted that I don’t watch it. I have much more important things to do than pass my time on the sofa swilling drama, celebrity news, gossip, and soap operas. Not me.

My harvest, however, has been rather meager lately. I feel the concern of a looming winter with little to feed me, to sustain me. I was brought up short when I realized that I do watch because daytime TV comes in many forms. It’s whatever takes us away from the fields where we can sow and then gather what nourishes us:

Daytime TV is family drama.

Daytime TV is the Internet, e-mail, Facebook, news, weather, Google.

Daytime TV is junk food.

Daytime TV is one more cup of coffee, or tea, or even water.

Daytime TV is text messages.

Daytime TV is reading in bed in the morning—on a workday.

Daytime TV is going to bed at 9:00, not because I’m sleepy, but to escape into the book I was reading that morning.

Daytime TV is thrift shops, yard sales, flea markets, consignment shops, the mall, the outlets, discount stores, department stores . . .

Daytime TV is gossip.

Daytime TV is judgment.

Instead of writing, rather than going into the metaphorical work fields each day, I watch far too much daytime TV. In the fields, there is no family drama. There is no computer. There are no text messages.

In the fields, a person cannot watch TV. In the fields, the sun will shine a finite number of hours. In the fields, different crops have a finite time for growing.

My time is finite. My art is finite. As is yours.

It is time to step away from daytime TV and head into the fields.