Last Saturday at the Arboretum

Last week, when I said to a colleague, “see you Tuesday,” she replied, “where are you going?”  It was as if simply to enjoy where I live or rest or quietly take care of house and garden was not within the range of possibility.  Is it that I am somehow not worthy if I have not planned to do something I could talk about when I returned to the office?  Or is it that pervasive societal sense that happiness lies only in finding new and more experience?

I think that it is important to have episodic time away from doing.  I used to get sick when I’d been running around non-stop with work and errands and exploration, etc.  Now I try to take some quiet time at decent intervals.  It does not need to be a full day.  Just a couple of solid hours without engaging in a planned activity every couple of weeks makes all the difference in my mood, my health, and the quality of my work.