In some families (okay, my family), there’s a first birthday tradition for children. A parent sets out three objects: a silver dollar, a book, and a cup. Then everyone sits back and waits to see which one the child picks up first.

You can probably guess the symbolism of these objects. If the tot snaps up the dollar, (s)he’s destined for wealth and power. The child who opens the book will adopt intellectual pursuits and live the life of the mind. The kid who grabs the cup? Well, let’s hope (s)he opens a successful wine bar.

I, erudite child, greedily snatched the book. And I must confess, this acquisition of things to read has become something of a lifelong habit. Which means I have spent vast quantities of time in bookstores.

Being a bookstore junkie, unlike many other forms of addiction, is not without merit. Bookstores encourage democratic values. Mysteries receive the same shelf treatment as histories. Skinny volumes sit next to fat tomes. And a used book is as good as a book whose spine has yet to be cracked (unless someone has underlined all their favorite passages with a wide-tip felt marker). Since no book lover worthy of the name ever throws a book in the trash (my heart seizes up just thinking about such a deed), used bookstores also play their part in recycling.

 I think we can all agree that bookstores contribute greatly to the good of society. What perhaps is lesser known are the many health benefits to be reaped from hanging out in bookstores. Just a brief burst of erratic research on my part has uncovered the following:

Bookstores Provide:

1. Peace of Mind

As wealth management strategists (who are these guys???) love to remind us, the key to true peace of mind starts with financial security. Know where your money goes. Be able to lay hands on your assets quickly. Bookstores address both these concerns. You know where your money’s gone. It’s gone to bookstores. As for getting to your assets, they’re right at your fingertips 24/7, alphabetized and neatly shelved or randomly stacked on all available horizontal surfaces.

2. Greater Physical Flexibility

Bookstores give you many of the benefits of yoga without having to buy special pants or stand on your head.  A single afternoon spent in a bookstore takes you through numerous reps of The Sun Salutation and Downward Facing Dog as you squat down low then fully extend upward to read through the selections on every shelf from Fiction to Travel.

Used bookstores may be the best gyms of all. Organized in a way that no one can fathom, they provide a good stretch for your hamstrings while you attempt to discover the title of that book lying way, way up near the ceiling. There’s also the thigh-killing duck walk from pile to pile, as you sift through stacks of titles, hoping to find that one out-of-print book you’ve been seeking since 1990.

And for sheer aerobic exercise, nothing beats a couple of runs up and down the four flights of stairs at Foyles flagship store in London. With its 200,000+  different titles on more than four miles of shelves, Foyles keeps you moving. (Note: I believe this magnificent bookstore on Charing Cross Road is where all good bibliophiles go when they die.)

3. A Boost in Caffeine Consumption

Scientists have discovered that consuming a lot of coffee has multiple health benefits. Not only may dosing up on the caffeine decrease your chances of developing Alzheimer’s or dying from a cardiovascular disease, it also releases fatty acids into the bloodstream that become a source fuel for your muscles. You’re getting fit just sitting in your local bookstore café with a cup of java and your favorite read. Stay all day. Stay forever. Think of the muscles you’re fueling.

4. Stress Reduction

Yes, yes, I’ve read those articles that assure us some stress is okay, even good, but I ask

you: When you’re stressed, does it ever feel healthy, or does it feel like you’re one beat away from a massive pulmonary meltdown? Bookstores are excellent places for the over-stressed. I can personally vouch for this. In my little life, I’ve had some number of less-than-pleasant calamities (send $500 for the complete list), but NOTHING BAD HAS EVER HAPPENED TO ME IN A BOOKSTORE. So, Q.E.D. (as my high school geometry teacher used to say) bookstores reduce stress.

5. Connection With Others

From reducing incidents of minor illness to increasing our longevity, scientists are proving over and over that social connections are crucial to our well-being. And what lovelier people can you hope to meet than those who frequent bookstores? One of my favorite memories occurred during the October 2011 ice storm (surprise!). After several days without power or heat, my husband and I heard through the grapevine that the Barnes & Noble one town over had just gotten their power back. Since we already had our coats on, we ran out the door and jumped in the car. We arrived to find hundreds of people wandering the store, reveling in the warmth, the availability of hot coffee, the working wi-fi connection. In every aisle, complete strangers chatted and laughed like old friends. It was a true model for a better, more harmonious world. A bookstore world.

6. Enhanced Foreign Travel

While I’m not certain this is normally considered a health benefit, it can’t hurt. As the photos here show, bookstores dot the planet, making bookstore browsing an international form of entertainment. My husband and I have visited bookstores in Paris, Lisbon, Florence, Arles, Toronto, Montreal, Madrid, London, and a bunch of other places. Okay, they were English-language bookstores (though I parlez-vous Franҫais, I’m not quite up to reading Proust in the original), but they were bookstores, and they did enhance our travel.

Nowhere is this truer than at Foyles flagship store (see Greater Physical Flexibility above). A highlight of every trip to London is “book day.” Entering Foyles, we arm ourselves with baskets, set a time to meet, and then go our separate ways to gather books to our hearts’ content. There are only two rules: 1) There is no limit set on the books we can choose, and 2) We don’t bother about prices. When time’s up, we bring our books to the main desk where some lovely bookstore clerk boxes them up, we pay, and for less than the price of a beer and sandwich at most airports, our carton of reads is shipped by courier, often arriving home before we do.

7. A Happier Heart

Science has uncovered some pretty compelling evidence that what makes you happy also makes your heart happy and, therefore, less prone to heart disease. Now, I ask, what could be happier than wandering a bookstore? All those titles. Aisles and aisles of books whispering read me, read me. As Neil Gaiman said: A book is a dream that you hold in your hand.

Bookstores are the repositories of our dreams.

This post is not for the relentlessly ambitious, nor is it for those who feel no driving need to accomplish any particular thing in this life. This post is for the rest of us: The ones who feel like we should be out “living life” when we’re buried deep in our work. The same ones who suffer the nagging pressure to get back to work when doing anything that isn’t work. (We know who we are.)

So, if like me, your Sisyphean attempts to push that rock (novel, start-up, thesis) up the hill find you second-guessing your every move and feeling guilty about both what you’re doing and what you’re not doing, read on.

My personal guilt cycle goes something like this:

1. I’m not getting any younger.

2.  I need to finish editing this book.

3. There’s more to life than this damn book.

4. I should be _______  (Fill in the blank with any of the fun, groovy activities I’m not doing  because I’m always editing the book.)

5. I should really be working on the next book.

6. I’m not getting any younger.

When the guilt cycle hits high spin, it’s not pretty.

Some people blame the human penchant for guilt on centuries of the Judeo-Christian work ethic, but when it comes to guilt about time, I blame the aphorism.

Aphorisms are those pithy little observations that are said to impart a general truth. But even the briefest glance at a list of common aphorisms reveals their tendency to mind-boggling contradiction:

Look before you leap. / He who hesitates is lost.

The more the merrier. / Two’s company, three’s a crowd.

Stop and smell the roses. / Keep your nose to the grindstone.

Give him an inch and he’ll take a mile. / Give him enough rope and he’ll hang himself. (In that case, better give him the inch first.)

And then there’s the mother of all contradictory aphorisms: Live each day as if it were your last.

It sounds so lofty, so noble, doesn’t it? But like a salted caramel latte laced with chocolate, it’s packed with guilt. Taunting us that it’s not enough to muddle through each day, doing the best we can with some mundane blend of work, chores, errands, and goofing off. Live-each-day-as-if-it-were-your-last, like a cop with a heavy nightstick, lays on the pressure: Are you having the most amazing, profound life you can? Or are you just taking up oxygen?

If I were truly living today as if it were my last, I would begin with a huge stack of blueberry pancakes, spend the morning browsing bookstores, and then pick one of those tomes to enjoy over a cup of good java at my favorite café. After lunch (a sizeable slab of cheesecake) on the rooftop deck of the local bistro, I’d relax in a hot tub with my husband and enjoy a couples massage. I’d cap it all off with a night of dancing and a bottle of Italian red.

It would indeed be a great DAY, but I have some serious doubts about it making a great LIFE.

Recently, in the throes of this dilemma (while folding the laundry—a compromise—it’s not editing the book, but it’s not goofing off either), I paused long enough to see an interview with Frances Fox Piven on MSNBC’s The Last Word. It was a moment of clarity: Eighty-three years young, Fox Piven has spent her life fighting the good fight. Talking to Lawrence O’Donnell, she radiated strength, humor, intelligence, and stamina. Watching her, I thought: She is exactly what I hope to be.

Now, I can’t say what Fox Piven’s life has been, but here are a few of the known facts:

• She is a professor of political science and sociology at the Graduate Center, CUNY, and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.
• She grew up in Queens, attended P.S. 148, earned a B.A., M.A., and Ph.D., all from the University of Chicago—a scholarship student, she waited tables to make ends meet.
• She has served on the board of the ACLU and held office in various professional associations including the Society for the Study of Social Problems.
• She’s written books galore including Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America.
• She has devoted her life to social activism and made significant contributions to social theory.

All this sounds glamorous. A life of exclamation points. But I strongly suspect that a woman who says, “I believe in the necessity for struggle by people at the bottom of any society,” is no stranger to roadblocks, frustration, setbacks, and uncertainties. To work for social justice is to take on the Hydra whose heads multiply by a factor of ten for every one slain. One just rolls with it. All of it.

And rolling with life—all of it—may be the antidote to guilt. Guilt eats our energy, leaves us doubting, renders us unable to fully engage with whatever we’re doing (yes, even if what we’re doing is playing online solitaire).

Instead of always feeling guilty for what we think we should be doing, or what we fear we’re neglecting, or what we might have accomplished by now, I think it may be enough to just be. To say, at the end of the day: I had a day, and with any luck I’ll have another tomorrow.

Imagine the possibilities for happiness in that.

As Pete Seeger (by way of Ecclesiastes) wrote:    

To everything – turn, turn, turn
There is a season – turn, turn, turn
And a time to every purpose under heaven.
 

“It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?”                                                                                                                              (Henry David Thoreau)

It’s mid-January and, depending on your personal tolerance for masochism, you may already be hearing the crack! of those New Year’s resolutions. You know the ones I’m talking about: eat less, exercise more, eliminate stress, organize your closet/house/universe. There’s nothing inherently wrong with these goals. The problem is they quickly drain enthusiasm because they address our shoulds but not our dreams. No one lives to lose ten pounds. So, before we get much older, let’s make a pact and declare 2016 the year we embrace our dreams. Go all out. Lay the foundations for, or continue building the life we really want, the one that speaks to our true selves.

Everyone harbors dreams. Listen to kids. They can invent a million dreams on a summer afternoon. But by the time we’re adults, that equation has shifted to a million reasons why we can’t pursue our heart’s desire: How can I become an artist/dancer/open my own B&B when I’ve got student loans to pay down/ three kids to feed/am past age 50? It’s true, there’s a world of responsibilities at 40 you never imagined at 10, but there’s also a lot more fear: What if people think I’m crazy? What if I try and don’t make it?

You can drown in reasons and argue with your fears forever. Nothing untried can be proved or disproved. So I will repeat here the best piece of advice I ever got from a writers’ conference: Leap and the net will appear.

As a college student in the Midwest, I used to hitch rides with kids driving home to the NYC area on semester breaks. Arriving in Manhattan, I’d rent a student room for $6/day on the upper floors of a Madison Avenue hotel and walk. Everywhere. I just needed to breathe in that “center of the world” energy and hope because it was my energy and hope, too. After college, I landed a job as editor at a publishing company in Michigan, and traveled the country learning the ropes of the apparel trade while writing how-to-succeed articles for women’s retailers. I met a lot of good people, but it wasn’t my dream. So, I turned in my resignation, loaded up my VW Bug, and drove to Boston where I signed a lease on a small apartment. (I figured it was easier to be poor in Boston than NYC.)

I leapt and—miracle!—the net did appear. For me, it was the offer my company made to continue my editorship on a contractual basis from my Boston home. It was a great and unexpected gift, saving me the hassle of looking for work, but if it hadn’t happened, I would have waited tables or manned the Slurpee machine at my local 7-11 to support my writing. Sometimes, someone else holds out the net. Sometimes, we have to weave it ourselves. Usually, it’s a combination of both. But mostly, it’s about wanting something so much and believing you are capable. When you see with the eyes of a dream, you begin to spot opportunities outside the range of normal vision. (Don’t worry, it’s not all Shangri-la. I’m going to fess up to some BIG mistakes before we’re through here, and I invite you to laugh long and loud or shake your head in despair of me. I just want to illustrate that nets do appear, and you often have to leap before you see them.)

So, I moved to Boston, wrote my first novel, revised it a bunch of times, and tackled a few short stories. Doing my old job outside an office gave me a lot more hours to write. (It’s amazing how much time gets wasted in offices.)

It’s true that when you’re young, you don’t worry so much about stepping outside the conventional. You’re not particularly dizzied at the idea of beating your own path. Indeed, unless you’re born with a silver spoon in your mouth, what else can you do in your early 20s? But, I don’t believe our dreams vanish with age. More like they get shoved into some dark corner and silenced in the cacophony of our busy lives. Doubts creep in, grow up around them, cut off their oxygen. We must fight this silencing. A Facebook friend, Jo Anne Shumard, recently posted this: “Doubt is like being afraid to color outside the lines. Do it anyway.”

What happens, though, if you make a mistake, maybe many mistakes? Well, you will. Obstacles arise. Things fall apart. Failure lurks. That first novel I referred to earlier? After typing THE END, I mentioned it to my hairdresser. She had a sister whose college roommate had become an assistant editor at what is today a division of one of the Big Five publishing houses in New York. Cut to the chase: I had lunch with the sister. She recommended me to her editor friend. I sent off the manuscript and the editor loved it. Yes! I thought, I’m on my way! The catch was that as an assistant, she needed her boss, a senior editor, to read the book. A second letter arrived three months later. The senior editor liked my book, but had a list of specific changes he wanted to see before making an offer. Still great, right? Except I was so young and so clueless about the industry and had yet to meet other writers, I thought this meant I had bombed. I put the novel in a drawer and went off to Europe. (I know. I know. I can only offer this example as one that perfectly answers the question: How dumb can you be?)

But doubts don’t kill you. Mistakes don’t kill you. I continued writing and had kids and paid the bills by doing freelance articles for business publications and newspapers. From there, I broke into feature articles for women’s magazines and got a regular gig online. I made and still make decent money editing college texts. But I never gave up fiction.  I went to writers’ conferences, joined critique groups, and just kept learning my craft. And now I’ve got a novel I’m shopping and another I’m writing. Life is good. Hard sometimes, but good. Kathryn Stockett tells the story of how she revised and revised her novel The Help while getting rejections that would have crushed a lesser soul (“There’s no market for this kind of tiring writing.”), BUT the 61^st  agent she queried said yes. The Help enjoyed a long ride on the New York Times bestseller list, sold more than a million copies, and was made into a movie. Seriously, read her story here. She will inspire you to never quit.

Yes, luck definitely plays a role. There are so many things we don’t control. But I’ve always liked the quote by humorist/writer Sam Levenson (on the struggle up from his immigrant tenement childhood): “I discovered that the more I hustled, the luckier I seemed to get.”

What happens, though, if you go for your dreams and they don’t materialize in the way you  imagined? Well, what does? If you strive for your dreams until your last breath, and that last breath finds you still striving, you will have lived a life pursuing what you loved. There are worse epitaphs. As business magnates are fond of telling us, all opportunity carries risk. But you can’t really do a risk assessment on your dreams without asking: What do I risk by not following my heart?

So, as we launch out into 2016, I wish you a year—and a lifetime—of dreams. Remember that John Lennon was once dismissed as “hopeless” and “certainly on the road to failure.” Stephen King worked a drudge job in an industrial laundry while writing Carrie. Even Albert Einstein was told he “[would] never amount to anything.” All they had were their dreams, a fierce belief in themselves, and an unquenchable determination.

So, keep leaping. And maybe pack a few bandages.