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One of the good things about getting older is that it turns out to be okay to slow down once in awhile. I won’t be sixty for almost two years, and most of the time I feel as if I’m still on the sunny side of forty, but there are days when I feel like giving myself permission to downshift the pace of my life. My hand gets tired of holding a pencil, so I let it take an hour off. And with the hand goes the rest of me.
It’s nice. I no longer feel as if I should feel guilty. (I don’t think I ever did really feel guilty.)
It makes it easier to take a stand like this when I know I don’t have to answer to anybody for my time. All I have to do is get the work done, and working at home gives me the advantage of doing it when I’m in the mood. Not that I’m ever in the mood, but there are times when I have more energy and fewer distractions, and that’s when I’m most productive. If I take a little nap during the day, or spend some time reading, I don’t resent working until well past eight o’clock, as I did tonight to finish the weekly payroll.
The Boss doesn’t know it, but fifteen years ago, when I worked for him in an actual office at a real desk, I would sometimes fall asleep sitting up, when he wasn’t around. I read the morning paper from cover to cover during the course of the day. There was no TV in the office, and we weren’t online then, but I know that if the Internet were available, I’d have been on it all day. And I went home every day at 4:00 pm.
Still, I’ll take the fluid style of getting the job done that I’ve perfected since I moved out of that office and away from that desk. | 
