"Smile with your liver."

Perhaps I am becoming a hedonist.

In the past seven days I have sipped on three different slices of chocolate cake, like silk.

This morning my friends and I bounced along in the sunshine to Mr. Pancake House for a rare breakfast treat—spinach mushroom omelet, airy pancakes and chips of dark chocolate on the side—instead of doing homework. During Tai Chi class, the three other girls and I asked our instructor to let us learn in the park today. He said yes. For an hour, we were the local live entertainment as we attempted to develop grace, flexibility, and agility in the dappled sunlight. Afterward I stretched on my bathing suit, which hasn’t left my drawer since Christmas in Hawaii, laid a towel on the lawn, and lollied there “bathing” while reading my Film textbook.  The sun is such good soap.

Every other night I read my roommates child stories like Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs or Stellaluna orOld Jake’s Skirts or The True Story of the Three Little Pigs. Lindsay falls asleep before I finish, and I feel like a mom.

This weekend I watched Eat Pray Love and learned to smile with everything I have—even my liver. A grinning Italian in the movie spoke words that particularly grabbed my attention: “Americans know entertainment, but they don’t know pleasure.”

We know entertainment, but we don’t know pleasure. We know how to party, but we don’t know how to celebrate. We know thrills, but we don’t know savor.

We know how to do nothing, but we don’t know rest.

This truth has found me tangled in a schedule of busyness and business, calendars and to-do lists and strained sleep and no time to read or play. When I do find that flighty moment of freedom, I sit and stare, or sleep, or try to relax and prepare for the next onslaught of forced productivity. But I do not rest.

So now I am on a quest. For pleasure, for celebration, for savor, for rest.

Life is beauty, and a waist is a terrible thing to mind, and love is meant to be risky and fierce and deep, and sunshine is only felt on the skin, not through a window or TV screen, and believing in Jesus is a relationship, and time passes whether or not we make the right grades or say the right things or play it safe, and Sabbath is still a commandment.

Without asking anyone, without consulting my schedule, without convincing myself not to do it, I bought myself a plane ticket to Italy. I will be tasting Florence two weeks from today.

Maybe I’ll learn something from those grinning Italians. In the meantime, though, I think it’s time for a good nap.