Waiting For A Challenge

Mr. Willoughby and Marianne Dashwood

I've been reading Sense and Sensibility for an upcoming Book Club meeting with ladies from my church. I was pleased to see a classic on the list. I've read it before, but like all classics, can be read again with great pleasure.

This Summer has been a rather long, boring Summer. We are back in a city we lived in before, but in another part of town that is new to us and not close to our former friends. While we know our way around the city and not everything is new, it is new enough to not have established close friends, be enrolled in any activities, or have a routine of social activities. Plus, we don't have much money to entertain ourselves with, so our homebody nature has been amplified by circumstances.

I realized that our boring Summer is giving us all a sense of malaise. I want that to change and began thinking of what we can do to break out of the current discouragement.

It dawned on me that Nayna might enjoy reading Sense and Sensibility with me, in fact, I thought she may have already read it since she has read several other Jane Austen titles. I asked her about it and she hadn't read it yet. Suddenly I asked her, "Do you want to read it and go to Book Club with me?

Within an hour she is happily engrossed in Sense and Sensibility. All she needed was a simple suggestion, something I have avoided somewhat purposefully this Summer. Maybe it was just the thing we needed. A void was created by allowing everyone to get to a point where they welcome input from me in the form of simple suggestions. The time to hang out and be "bums" for several weeks has given everyone a hankering for a Challenge to be presented. Of course, they rarely ask for that challenge, it just has to come at the right time.