All our tomorrows find their own ways

About 90 minutes from now, I'm scheduled to zip off on an intergalactic adventure with a rag-tag group of spacefarers. Translation: It's game night.

Game night has been a regular Saturday night fixture in my life for nearly a year, with lengthy breaks while I temporarily moved across state for a work assignment, and now for about the last six weeks as the other gamers had other commitments. I've missed the gaming during this last break as it represents one of my only, okay the only social outlet I have outside of work and the Internet.

In the interim, I've filled my Saturday nights with reading or watching movies on DVD. I went to karaoke once -- formerly a fixture of my social life before that out-of-town work assignment -- but the fun surprisingly had disappeared, like air leaking from a tire so slowly you don't notice until suddenly you have a flat.

While I am looking forward to seeing the gamer group, I'm afraid the fun may be leaking from this activity, too, as I evolve into some sort of cave-dwelling creature who desires only solitude. I'm watching the clock tick and looking at the stack of books yet to read (at last count I have nearly 300 unread books in my apartment) and the unfinished short story I'm trying to write, and I just want to stay in. I have too many plans, too many desires, and not enough time to accomplish them all. And that doesn't even include the laundry or bathroom-scrubbing that should be done this weekend. In the words of the fabulous Greta Garbo, "I vant to be alone."

I want to dive back into The Artist's Way and start writing morning pages again. I want to finish this short story and a dozen others sitting incomplete on my hard drive. I want to read all of those books on my shelf, but these things require time, and I am nothing if not an impatient creature. Our days on this planet, after all, are finite, and each person can accomplish only so much in one lifetime. I've already allowed 35 years to slip by while crossing far too few items off of my lifetime to-do list.

But shouldn't an evening of fun, imagination and laughter rank high on that to-do list? Won't I be a happier person, if only for a few hours, if I go? I hope the answer is yes, and that The Artist's Way and those short stories and all of those books will still be there for me to tackle tomorrow. For while it's wonderful to suck the marrow from each day as though it's our last, sometimes we also must live as if tomorrow is another day.