Hello friend,
Last week I asked what you would get rid of in your calendar if you knew it could not hurt anyone.
Here is my honest answer. Nothing. There is nothing in there.
That is not the flex it sounds like.
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WHERE WE LEFT OFF
I mentioned a few letters ago that I had moved and had not filled the calendar back up. What I did not say is that there is a sadness sitting in that empty space, and it caught me off guard, because I spent about thirty years assuming a wide open week was the prize at the end of all of it.
The strangest part is the bags. We have spent weeks now going through the ghost bag and the performance bag, and when I went looking for mine I could not find them. No obligations I am dragging behind me out of guilt. Nothing I keep saying yes to because of who it makes me look like. My children are grown, my communities are behind me, and the hobbies have not arrived yet.
And instead of feeling triumphant about that, I felt oddly unmoored. Who am I without the edge of complaint. I had no idea I was so attached to it.
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THIS WEEK
So I went looking for why.
There is a study published in the Journal of Consumer Research in 2017 by Silvia Bellezza and her colleagues, and it explains more about our calendars than we would probably like. What they found is that busyness itself became the status symbol. Being overworked and short on time reads to other people as competence, ambition, and being in demand. The woman with no time is the woman who matters.
Which is exactly why "I am so busy" became the most socially acceptable thing a woman could say about her life, and "my week is wide open" still lands like a confession.
Sitting underneath that is something simpler and a little more awkward. We do not actually want to be idle. But we will not get up and do a thing unless we have a reason we can defend to someone else. Given no reason, we stay where we are. Given even a thin excuse, we move, and we feel better for having moved, even when the task was never worth doing.
So the ghost bag and the performance bag were never just clutter. They were doing a job. They handed us a defensible reason to be in motion and a story that made us look important while we were in it. Take them out and you do not get freedom on day one. You get a vacancy. And a vacancy is uncomfortable in a way that being overbooked never was, because nobody congratulates you for it.
You built this life. Which means you're the only one who can build something different.
The work side of my calendar is not empty, for the record. I am building the podcast, there is a workshop taking shape, and I am going after speaking engagements. That part has a direction and a plan.
It is everything else that is wide open.
This weekend I filled the love bag properly.
A cottage belonging to my sister and brother in law. My children, my grandchildren, food cooked mostly by my son, who quietly turned into a chef while I was not paying attention. I belly laughed with my grown children in a way I have not in years, although I will admit they have my sense of humour, so I may be a compromised judge of how hilarious they actually are.
I swam in the lake in the stillness of the morning, just after the loons had gone quiet and the sound was still sitting on the water. I swam again in warm summer rain. No suit either time.
I have nothing to compare that to. Water God made, holding a body that has carried a great deal and asked for very little, and asking nothing of it in return. No mirror. No opinion. Nothing to cover. If you have never done it, do it once, in real water, and pay attention to what happens in your chest when you let yourself be held by something that was here long before you and will be here long after you.
A pool is not the same thing, and I say that as a woman who did a fair amount of illegal pool hopping in her twenties. Different sport entirely.
What is missing is community.
Monday will be full of friends in my old town, and it will be wonderful, and it is also the evidence. I have not built anything where I actually live now. Writing that sentence brought up some very familiar noise. Will I fit in. What if I turn up and it is not for me.
And underneath that, the more honest problem. I do not yet know what makes my heart sing as a hobby. I genuinely do not know what I am looking for. It might be the gym. It might be something I have not met yet.
I am not troubled by that. I am curious about it, which is a completely different feeling, and one I would like a great deal more of.
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A QUESTION TO CARRY
So, for next week.
What are you curious about that you have not tried yet?
Not what you should do. Not what would be good for you. What makes you curious. Hit reply and tell me.
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One thing.
There are sleep stories on my YouTube channel now. Enough of you asked for them that I stopped putting it off.
If you have never come across one, a sleep story is not a story in the way you are picturing. There is no plot worth following and nothing gets resolved. It is a long, slow, deliberately uneventful description of somewhere pleasant, read quietly, usually twenty to forty minutes, and it is built so that you never hear the end of it. That is the entire design. Give the mind something soft to hold so it stops rehearsing tomorrow.
They are for the woman whose body is exhausted and whose head will not close. If you lie down and immediately begin a full review of a conversation from 2004, these were made for you. They also work for the three in the morning wake up, when the real choice is between lying there and reaching for your phone.
One more coming. The sitting meditation from each podcast episode will be posted as its own track, so you can go back to it without scrolling through the whole episode looking for it. That request arrived enough times that it is now on the list.
In love, light and laughter,
Karen