A Saturday With Nothing Scheduled

Had a Saturday last month with genuinely nothing on it, no house calls booked, no game night, nobody expecting a call back or a piano tuned or anything from me at all, and I want to be honest, I didn’t handle it as well as I would have liked. I kept checking my phone for something I was supposedly forgetting. I reorganized a drawer that didn’t need reorganizing. I think I’m worse at unstructured time than I’d like to admit, which is a strange thing to notice about yourself at this age.

Eventually I made coffee and actually sat down with a book I’d been circling for a couple weeks without committing to, one of those mornings where the light comes in at the right angle through the kitchen window for about ninety minutes and then moves on, and I just stayed there past the point where the light had already shifted somewhere else, completely lost track of time. That’s rarer for me than it should be, a day where I lose track of the clock on purpose instead of by accident from being slammed with work.

I didn’t do anything with the rest of the day worth writing up in detail. Made lunch. Read some more. Took a walk down by the river, no real destination, turned around when I felt like turning around instead of when a route told me to. Didn’t touch a single board game the entire day, which might be the most notable part of this whole entry, since most of my weekends have at least one game somewhere in them.

I don’t think there’s a lesson here, and I’ve deleted two different attempts at wrapping this up with one because they both felt fake the second I wrote them. I just noticed, afterward, how unfamiliar an entirely unscheduled day had started to feel, and how long it took me to actually relax into it instead of hunting for something to be productive about. Might try to do this on purpose more than once a year instead of waiting for a Saturday to accidentally show up empty.