I am very easy to entertain.

Give me an audiobook, something to draw, a weird question to research, or a porch to sit on, and I can usually keep myself occupied for a very long time. I almost never get bored.

I get stir crazy sometimes. There are days when I have been in the house too long and I am ready to go somewhere, anywhere, just to see something different. But bored? Not often.

Audiobooks probably deserve a lot of the credit lately. Thank goodness for the library, because the Libby app has helped me read hundreds of books over the last couple of years. I listen while I work on art, while I cook with Raeleigh, while I sit on the porch, and before I fall asleep at night.

Right now I usually go back and forth between one fiction book and one narrative nonfiction book. Since I write narrative nonfiction myself, reading more of it feels like a pretty good use of my time. I get to enjoy the story while also paying attention to how somebody else tells one.

Then there is research. I love research.

The fact that we can carry Google around in our pockets still feels a little amazing to me. I can wonder about something and, within seconds, start finding out more about it. One question turns into another, and suddenly I know far more than I ever needed to know about whatever caught my attention that day.

Writing works in a similar way for me, except instead of picking apart something in the outside world, I am usually picking apart something I think. Writing is one of the easiest ways I know to challenge my own thinking. It makes me explain why I believe something instead of just accepting that I do.

Sometimes I start writing convinced I know exactly what I think and realize halfway through that I don’t.

I love that about it.

Art keeps a different part of me busy. I can put on an audiobook and create something with my hands at the same time. My mind is following one story while my hands are making something else entirely.

Earlier this year, I became completely focused on drawing circle journaling pages. I drew more than 80 of them. Apparently I could sit there forever thinking up another design and drawing another page.

Now I need to digitize them so I can actually share and sell them, and suddenly that intense focus is nowhere to be found.

Books have also become one of the ways I connect with people. One of my favorite things I did this year was read Sociopath. I recommended it to my brother Colin after I started it, so of course he read it too and finished it faster than I did.

For nearly a week, we had our own little sibling book club. We sat on the porch in the evenings and talked about the book, the ideas in it, and what we thought about all of it.

I love conversations like that with Colin. We connect really well intellectually, and when we have something interesting to dig into together, it is engaging in a way I really enjoy.

Read something interesting. Hand it to my brother. Sit on the porch and pick it apart for a week.

That is a pretty good time as far as I am concerned.

I think I have always been this way. As a kid, I read books, listened to music and radio programs, played outside, and made up songs that I sang to my cats. I did not need much. I just needed something interesting.

That part of me became more important when I became chronically ill, although getting there was not easy.

I had no idea illness was going to keep me home as much as it has. I had no idea how much of my time would eventually be spent at doctors, managing symptoms, or rearranging plans around what my body could do that day.

And I definitely did not expect to lose the ability to hike and be active in nature the way I once was.

There was grief in that.

The life I had imagined for myself did not include having to calculate whether my body could handle something before I decided whether I wanted to do it. It did not include missing things because I was too sick or in too much pain.

Curiosity did not erase any of that. It did not make me stop wishing I could hike again or make me happy about being limited.

But it gave me somewhere else to look.

If my body would not let me go somewhere, there was still a book. If I did not have the energy for a big project, I could draw. If money was tight, the library was still free. If I wondered about something, I could learn about it. If I could not quite figure out what I thought, I could write until I understood myself a little better.

The boundaries of my life changed.

The world stayed interesting.

I see that sense of wonder in Royce now.

Because nobody has cut our grass yet after all the rain and storms, the dandelions have had plenty of time to go to seed. Rae showed Royce that if you pick one and blow on it, all those little white seeds fly away.

He loved it.

This morning, while we were outside, he found one all by himself. He came to show me, so excited that he knew what to do with it now. Then he blew on it and watched the seeds scatter.

It was just a dandelion.

Except to him, it wasn’t.

It was something he had learned. Something he could do. Something in the world he understood today that he did not understand before.

Watching him reminds me how easily adults stop doing that. We have seen dandelions before. We know what happens when the wind catches them. We stop looking.

But I will be 45 this year, and I do not think there is any reason I have to stop being impressed by things just because I have been alive long enough to see them before.

I can still notice a beautiful tree. I can still enjoy a calm breeze. I can still watch a storm roll in and think it is incredible. I can still read a book that changes the way I understand another person. I can still learn something I did not know yesterday.

Maybe being easy to entertain is really just being easy to interest.

And I think that has been one of the things that keeps my world big, even when my circumstances make it smaller.

My body has limits. My budget has limits. There are places I cannot go and things I cannot do the way I once could.

But there is still so much to notice.

So much to learn.

And apparently, there are still dandelions worth stopping to watch.

I hope I never lose that.