empty days

If you hang around me long enough, you'll find me repeating myself. This might be a holdover from teaching high school and echoing the same catchphrases over and over to help my students build routines—teachers know that sweet victory of having your mannerisms and sayings mimicked.

Things I repeat about writing:

• All the rules are made up.
• There's no way to win at this.
• You're a writer even when you're not writing.

That's only a small handful, but the 3rd point is one that takes many forms. Sometimes I'm encouraging us to take days off instead of treat those days like failure. Or I might ask you to consider what's on your menu of creativity and choose a non-writing option for a change. (See also: creative charcuterie, ___ counts as writing, your creative life is more than a page)

The other day, my friend Jess (who has been my friend since our days sharing posts on nascent LiveJournal) sent me a snippet of May Sarton's diary about the importance of empty days. Sarton wrote:

"I always forget how important the empty days are, how important it may be sometimes not to expect to produce anything, even a few lines in a journal. I am still pursued by a neurosis about work inherited from my father. A day where one has not pushed oneself to the limit seems a damaged damaging day, a sinful day. Not so! The most valuable thing we can do for the psyche, occasionally, is to let it rest, wander, live in the changing light of a room, not try to be or do anything whatever."

I love it, obviously, perhaps most of all because Sarton doesn't talk about the importance of getting away from the work and out into the world. She doesn't advise us to have an adventure or take on a chore or be productive in some other way. Instead, what's important, she says, is to produce nothing.

Not a few lines of journaling. Not a clean house. Not a new hobby.

To not try to be or do anything whatever.

How often do you allow yourself an empty day?

I'm thinking of winter break as a teacher, the days in the middle that could squish into one long, cozy afternoon. Couch slug days, one of my roommates called them (Sarton's branding is much more palatable).

What do you need after an empty day, to shake off the slug?

As someone trying to break the tendency to work all day, every day, I'm drawn to the idea of requiring empty days for myself. And intrigued by what counts as "empty"—a day in which I don't write or work, but do spend hours in the kitchen tackling a time-consuming, labor-intensive recipe that I've been saving is its own kind of appealing, but not empty. What do I need to do in order to feel good without worrying about feeling productive (which is to say, "of use")?

New life goal: Be the changing light of a room.

How do empty days seem to you? What would your empty days be empty of/filled with?