A Slow Saturday Is Not a Wasted Saturday, and Here Is the Proof

Let me describe a Saturday from a few weeks ago. Nothing happened. That is why I want to write about it.

I woke up without an alarm, which at my age is a small miracle. The house was quiet. I made coffee and drank it standing at the back door, watching the fog burn off over the lake. A hummingbird came by the feeder twice. I did not check my phone. I did not have a plan. I just stood there long enough for the mug to go cold.

The morning

Around nine my son wandered out, hair everywhere, and asked if we had eggs. We did. I made too many and we ate them at the counter with the radio on low. We talked about nothing in particular. A video game he was playing. A guy at my work who tells the same joke every Monday. The dog, who has a new habit of sleeping in the bathtub.

After that I did one load of laundry and let it sit in the dryer too long. I read a few chapters of a book on the couch and fell asleep halfway through a page. I woke up to the sound of a neighbor’s mower and did not feel the usual jolt of guilt that I should be doing something. I just lay there for a minute and listened.

The afternoon

We drove to the hardware store for a part I did not strictly need. We walked the aisles slow, the way you do when the errand is really just an excuse to get out. On the way back we stopped for tacos and ate them in the car with the windows down. My son told me something about a friend that he had been holding onto for a while. It came out easy because there was no rush and nowhere to be. That would not have happened on a packed day.

Back home I fixed the thing with the part. It took twenty minutes. I sat in the yard afterward with a glass of water and watched the light go orange on the hills. I called my mom in Wisconsin. We talked for half an hour about her garden and my dad’s knee.

Why I used to hate days like this

For most of my adult life I treated a slow day as a failure. I had a running list in my head of everything I was not doing. Not working. Not improving. Not getting ahead. If I rested, I rested with one eye on the clock and a knot in my stomach. I thought rest was something you had to earn, and I never felt like I had earned it.

Then I noticed something. The weeks that went best, where I was patient at work and present at home, almost always came after a slow Saturday. The weeks where I snapped at people and dropped things came after weekends crammed with errands and obligations. The rest was not a reward for the good week. It was the cause of it.

I am not saying every weekend should be empty. Life has things that need doing. I am saying that a day with nothing to show for it often has the most to show for it. You just cannot see the proof until Tuesday.

If a slow day leaves you looking for something small and light to do with the kids or with yourself, the little games on this site are built for exactly that mood. Nothing competitive. Just a few minutes of good words and good thoughts.

How to have one

Leave one weekend day open. Not half open with a few things penciled in. Open. Do the things that come up, but do not go looking for things. Eat when you are hungry, nap when you are tired, talk when someone wants to talk. Put the phone somewhere inconvenient. Say yes to the hardware store run that is not really about the hardware.

And when the guilt shows up, and it will, remember that the slow day is doing work you cannot see. It is putting something back that the week took out. That is not wasted. That is maintenance.

Rest is not what you earn after the work. It is part of the work.