Unsegmented Saturday

Pixabay

Last Saturday, I had an unsegmented day. And it was wonderful.

For the past few weeks, I've had Saturday commitments. They've been valuable, fun things. A concert with my daughter. An evening out with friends. A lunch with another set of friends. I enjoyed every one of them, and would not have traded them in, even for that most precious of commodities, free time.

But last Saturday, the day and evening stretched out before me like a lovely, country road. Winding and meandering, it offered landmarks along the way, but I could visit them as I pleased, stopping where I wished, continuing past one and onto another, then doubling back if I wished to later on. Since we lost an hour Saturday night, the road might have been a tad shorter than usual, but with nothing to obstruct me, it felt long and luxurious.

Throughout the week, I move from classes to class prep to writing to meetings to appointments to household responsibilities to errands. Where I once had a job that reliably took the same chunk out of my day, making me unavailable for anything else from 8 to 4, I now have a patchwork of teaching, planning and writing. With the exception of the teaching, I can schedule everything else into whatever time slots I choose. This sounded great at first but, in reality, it means that some days, I get a lot of little things done (which usually ends up feeling like a lot of nothing), other days, I get a few big things done and most days, I don't accomplish what I set out to do at the beginning of the day and/or I'm up much too late checking things off my list.

But on unsegmented days, those rare days when I have no place to be, I feel free to meander from item to item on my list because rather than feeling boxed in, I feel as though time is plentiful. I often find myself still in my pajamas late in the day, having checked a lovely variety of things off my lists and having tackled at least one item from each of the teaching, writing and household/errands lists. As a result, I feel more relaxed because there was no point in the day at which I had to stop short to move on to something else. On unsegmented days, I get a sense of completion.

Unsegmented days are a luxury, yielding relief and relaxation beyond the 24-hour period they encompass. Even though I work hard to preserve one of these days several times a month, life intervenes, sometimes with activities that are necessary and sometimes with activities that are pleasurable. As a result, I find that these magical days arise much less frequently than I would like, and perhaps also less frequently than I need them to. (Perhaps that's why snow days are such a valuable, if sometimes inconvenient, commodity).

ProSmile via Pixabay

Yesterday afternoon offered a nice stretch of time to tie up loose ends, and this morning arrived bearing the list that seems to pop up every Monday. Today, the list seems less overwhelming than usual, however.

When's the last time you treated yourself to an unsegmented Saturday?