Old-Timey Weekend

This last weekend, I found myself doing the usual backlog of chores and cleaning from when I let myself get behind near the end of the work week. The weekend feels rushed and busy and full of chores.

Normally, this is a high-angst time for me. I always have this enormous backlog of Projects I’d like to be doing instead and never enough time. On top of that, I used to be what you might describe as an "angry cleaner".

But then I just stopped. I stopped worrying and rushing.

I suddenly realized there was, in fact, absolutely no reason to be in a hurry other than a lifetime of thinking that chores were something I needed to get done as fast as humanly possible.

It’s like a switch flipped inside me. The urgency was an illusion! How did I not see it before?

I cleaned slowly. Things that I normally fumble with, I did carefully and correctly.

That’s when I realized how tired I was of feeling so rushed and busy. Further, I realized that I was tired of trying to jam projects into days where they didn’t fit.

So I didn’t even try to get anything done on the computer. In fact, I barely looked at an Internet-connected device all weekend.

A name for it floated into my mind: "Old-Timey Weekend." A weekend where I just pretended I was living in a pre-digital era and was, in fact, retired and had all the time in the world to do these darned chores.

The more I thought about it, the clearer it became to me that I didn’t even have to pretend. It was actually true. I really did have all the time in the world to do the chores. It’s literally all I needed to do. That and spend some time with the family.

Why are the most stupidly obvious things sometimes so profound?

By the end of Old-Timey Weekend, I didn’t feel like a completely new person or anything, but I definitely felt like I’d made the right choice. I’d like to make this a habit. I think it will do wonders for my nerves. I’m already wondering how I survived this long.

Related: Weekends are the wrong length and Intentional Rest