I’ve always struggled with Saturdays.

Before you heckle me, hear me out—

Saturdays are plenty. I’m much more familiar with scarcity, which is evident on Friday nights and Sundays. But Saturdays are big and long, and that is somehow upsetting.

There is something languid, in a kind of nauseous way, about a Saturday. A Saturday at home is sunlight coming in hot through the window, still wearing pajamas at 11 and unable to change them because what is the next activity after all?, strange lunch (the strangest of meals no matter what, but stranger still at home on a Saturday), sitting in different positions across uncertain hours, then suddenly it’s 4:30 and a tiny whiny cloud of despair rains down. Where did all the lovely wide-open time go?

Activity-laden Saturdays are different: a kind of frenetic energy, hours that bend in strange directions, and a million possibilities of how to be a human. Couples carrying coffees around corners, women with totes full of farmer’s market goods, parking lots at the base of hills laden with hikers, restaurant patios full of people sharing appetizers, roads bearing shoppers destined to return that piece of hardware that didn’t quite work to the mega-mall, and lots of unseen people writing books or learning the clarinet or enjoying lots of Premium Content or cooking complicated meals for very interesting friends in their homes, and no matter which of these or infinite other activities one chooses, it often feels like it wasn’t quite the right one, or it was too short, or on the other hand it took far too long and now the whole lovely time is gone.

A few years ago I went through a solitary period. The phrase a great and terrible freedom bounced around my head a lot. Too many possibilities can become a cage if you let them.

Saturdays, for those (like me) with few real responsibilities, are a little microcosm of that great and terrible freedom.

I’ve heard that how you feel on a Monday is a clear view into how you feel about your life. But how you feel about a Saturday is, too. Monday shows how you feel about the yang in your life—what are you striving for? What is the weight of all your doings? How does that feel? But Saturdays show you how you feel about the yin—what does resting feel like? What does open time feel like? Who are you? What does being you feel like?

So if Saturdays often feel mildly depressing to me, one thing must be true: my relationship to yin needs help.

I’ve been thinking a lot about, for lack of a better way to put this, chilling out. This blog went quiet over the last few weeks of vacation as I tried to do less, be more. Say a gentle “no thanks” to the unspoken demand to justify my existence with proof that I do a lot, am busy, am important, am productive, am probably going to miraculously cheat death by having a lot to show for 2020. Resisting this means learning how to trust that, to paraphrase Jesus, tomorrow is tomorrow’s concern. Today’s trouble is enough for today. I don’t need to stay awake at night worrying how I’ll get all those things done that I crave doing.

After all, if I get them done but feel irritated by lovely wide-open luxurious free time that begins at the finish line, that’s…not ideal.

Here’s the irony: when I’m busy, I long for unstructured time. O, for a wide-open Saturday! My kingdom for a week without evening obligations! But then it happens and I go all lopsided. It turns out that I don’t naturally leap out of bed, exercise post-haste, then spend six uninterrupted hours writing a flawless segment of Book Three.

So here I am, on Saturday, sitting in the cool by my plants, in that wide-open time between Friday and Sunday. I didn’t Do much yet except a bit of yoga, dumping out the compost, building some flat-pack furniture, and quite possibly breaking a door.

I might Do Something after this. Perhaps better not.