How to Plan and Execute the Perfect Last-Minute Self-Care Day
Or a beautiful plan goes wrong...
1. Wait until you’re nearly too burnt out to make it out of bed. This is important, otherwise you’ll suspect you’re just being lazy.
2. Pick a location about one hour’s drive away that contains water, trees, and the horizon at a distance.
3. Pack a bag with things that make you happy. Some suggestions: a means of making fresh coffee, notebook, pens, reading book, sun hat, insect repellant, water bottle, delicious lunch you didn’t prepare yourself.
4. Drop your kids at school, leave the dog behind, and drive. You have about six magical hours.
5. Watch five police cars, ambulance, and fire truck roar past when you’re ten miles from your destination.
6. Notice the billowing black clouds rising dead ahead, like a gift from Sauron.
7. Join other traffic in the inevitable crawl, try for empathy when they close the freeway completely. Try not to think about how one hour has become nearly two.
8. Realize the toxic smoke cloud is blowing towards your idyllic destination and search for plan B.
9. Use the time creeping down the frontage road to decide on plan B instead of raging at the self-appointed VIPs who are using the hard shoulder as their personal overtaking lane.
10. Decide on a small wilderness area closer to the city and use the U-turn lane. Drive back the way you’ve just come.
11. Buy some coffee on the way.
12. Locate small wilderness area and note the wild prairie grasses are pretty, the sun is shining, and a breeze is blowing.
13. Note also incessant growling from the nearby freeway, train horns, rail crossing alarms, heavy machinery reversing and beeping…. There is no discernable birdsong.
14. Decide to go for a walk anyway. Notice the ponds have dried up in the drought, that the view from the purpose-built tower is amazing. Watch a colony of hornets building a nest in the underside of the solar-paneled roof.
15. Pay attention to the bushes with dried out seed pods, the grasses like pink candy floss, and that dragonflies appear to fly backwards while mating. Be thankful it’s too dry to see any alligators after all. Watch a bird of prey bank and swoop over the marshes. Imagine what it would be like to fly.
16. Receive flurry of texts from child, indicating school evacuation due to bomb threat. Reassure child, check in with other child, who is bored and wants to go to a friend’s house.
17. Search news sites, social media for latest information. Discover nothing newer than two years ago. Decide to trust school and go back to walking mindfully.
18. Receive more texts from child, each more urgent and demanding to be fetched from intolerable boredom.
19. Breathe. Stop for lunch.
20. Explain to child that you’re too far away to fetch them and they are safe where they are.
21. Write a poem about a fluffy and toxic looking caterpillar that seems to float over the picnic table. Enjoy blowing it off the table then lose sight of it in the grass. Lift your feet off the ground so it can’t climb back up your legs.
22. Meditate and try not to let the incessant beeping from the machinery behind the hedge annoy you.
23. Tell child your phone is low on battery and you can’t talk right now.
24. Check social media again for news. Find none.
25. Realize your phone is running out of battery and the in-car charging cable needs replacing.
26. Be thankful that bomb threat was just a hoax and that children are now back in class.
27. Refuse to come and get them any earlier.
28. Get swamped by frustration at this failure to disconnect for one day, but decide against being a mad woman who yells obscenities at trees.
29. Read wise words from Thich Nhat Hahn and find a glimmer of peace.
30. Go for another walk.
31. Notice it’s time to head back to the city before rush hour throws another spanner in the works.
32. Console yourself that misadventures are always better wrapped in a story.
Postscript: Since writing this, I have managed one successful ‘Blue Sky Day’ all to myself (on a weekend). A second one during school time also resulted in a hoax bomb threat at school. My kids seemed more resilient the second time (something to do with having unlimited data I suspect)!