Keeping busy, staying happy

Initially, it seemed like such a good idea. Since Holly was off to spend the weekend with her cousins, it was the perfect time for Rick and me to bring Tim and three of his friends up to Maine for Tim’s belated birthday celebration.  Both kids would have something special to do; neither one would feel left out of the fun.

But as the weekend approached, I began to suspect I’d taken on a little bit too much at one time. My mind was a jumble of details. Had I submitted the paperwork to the airlines for Holly to fly as an Unaccompanied Minor? Had I researched the ferry schedule in case Tim and his friends wanted to go biking on one of the Casco Bay islands? What time would we need to leave for the airport to get Holly checked in for her Friday morning flight? How many quarts of milk and orange juice would four 16-year-old boys consume in 48 hours? Did I have the two forms of ID I’d need for expedited airport security? Did Rick have the access card to the Portland garage?

By Friday morning, I thought my head would burst open and all the details would come rolling out. Just get through this weekend, I coached myself. Just get Holly safely off to DC; just keep the boys well-fed and reasonably supervised; and then you can de-stress.

And whether because of, or in spite of, my stressing over all the details, everything went beautifully. Holly had a wonderful time visiting her cousins. Tim and his friends were boisterous and cheerful, and much to my surprise, there was still food left in the pantry when their weekend in Maine ended.

Okay, I told myself when I woke on Monday morning. Now you can stop worrying about the weekend. It’s behind you and it was a success.

And then I remembered that Thanksgiving is in ten days and I still haven’t ordered our turkey (or the chicken or duck that we’ll need to make Tim’s beloved Turducken). Also the annual gathering Rick and I host every year for my high school crowd is next Monday and I should start planning for that. Also we need to choose a date for the annual holiday cookie exchange, which usually falls the first week in December. Also I should start working on our Christmas card.

It’s the nature of life as we currently live it that there aren’t really days when nothing needs to be planned or assessed or overseen. And sometimes it’s stressful. Especially at this time of year. I try to remind myself it’s all supposed to be fun, and if the stress of any individual undertaking outweighs the fun, I shouldn’t do it.  After all, we don’t have to host the annual high school gathering. We don’t even have to host Thanksgiving. And we certainly don’t have to send out Christmas cards.

But we will do all of those things, because ultimately, the fun does outweigh the stress, or the traditions wouldn’t exist.

In this morning’s paper, I read an article about homeless women in Boston who are now sleeping in parks and under bridges because the shelter in which they were living abruptly closed due to infrastructural problems.

“That’s what stress looks like,” I reminded myself. “Carrying around your belongings in a cardboard box because you have no place else to put them. Trips to visit cousins….belated birthday celebrations….holiday parties….holiday poems….those are not stress. Those are recreation.”

Of course they are, and of course any one of the women in the article would happily (and probably quite capably) take on any one of my sources of anxiety.

Have fun, I reminded myself. The holiday season is beginning.

And I will. I’ll remember that the stress and anxiety are trivial compared to the joy of getting together with family and friends. And it will all be wonderful, just as it is every year. 

Crossing my fingers for a boring weekend

I’m hoping for a boring weekend.

I need a weekend with no community events, no harvest fairs, no costume parties, no parades, no sporting events, no dinner parties, no concerts, no soirees, and no storm preparedness to do.

I need a plain dull weekend at home. I need to fold laundry, three basketsful. I want to do some cooking and baking. I should vacuum and dust and mop. There are light bulbs to change, plants to water, Halloween decorations to put away. The kids’ rooms are a mess. (Yes, that should be their responsibility. No, it’s not going to get done unless I’m standing in the room waving my arms like a semaphore.)

All of the things that can start to seem so tedious if you do them too many weekends in a row are starting to seem like something to be coveted, now that it’s been so long since I’ve taken the time for those tasks. The idea of vacuuming the house top to bottom actually appeals to me, and not only because I have a fabulous new vacuum cleaner. Just because I haven’t had enough time to devote to my house lately.

It’s been a busy fall, the way fall always is; my workload was heavier the past couple of months than I anticipated, and a few unexpected responsibilities popped up as well. Such as, for example, preparing for this week’s storm, which ate up several hours last weekend.

So this weekend I’m not going to invite anyone to do anything. I’m not going to suggest any cultural excursions to my family. I’m not even going to implore anyone to go for a walk with me. (Okay, that’s a little bit inaccurate; my friend Jane and I already have plans for a Sunday walk. But I promise I’ll try to keep it to just an hour.)

A day away from the weekend, it still all seems like a novelty, all those mundane cleaning and cooking and housekeeping chores that I’ve neglected these past few months. A few hours into Saturday, I’ll probably remember exactly why I’ve let myself get so easily distracted by community events, parties and cultural excursions instead lately – because they are all a lot more fun than vacuuming.

But not this weekend, or so I keep telling myself. My house needs attention, and for the time being, I feel like lavishing it on. Setting the clocks back means I’ll even have an extra hour to do it.

It might be months before this kind of mood strikes again. It’s a rare thing to get a craving for housework, and I don’t expect it to happen soon again. But as long as it lasts, I plan to work it.

 

Take it easy

A friend of ours is vacationing for several weeks on an island this summer. Every few days, she emails me to update me on her trip. And she always begins with a description of how many hours she has spent working each day since the last update.

Understand, this isn’t “voluntourism.” Working isn’t an inherent part of the vacation scheme. She’s a freelance writer, like me, and could theoretically go away for a few weeks without sitting down at the desk at all. But it’s very important to her to impress upon me that that’s not the case. So she tells me how many hours she worked – and then she goes on to cover the various water sports and cultural excursions that the vacation has encompassed so far.

This has compelled me to contemplate why she feels the need to report on her work schedule. In his essay “The Busy Trap” in the New York Times last month, Tim Kreider implies that being busy has become a badge of honor, that we all have plenty of acquaintances –like the one I’m describing – who seem to believe that if they don’t remind us again and again of how busy they are, we might think that they’re, I don’t know, on vacation. Slacking, even.

I try hard to avoid this inclination in myself and not to talk about how much work I have in the abstract. I’m happy to tell anyone who is interested about specific assignments currently under way, either because they’re interesting or because they are particularly challenging, but either way, the discussion is about the specific assignment, not the mere fact that I have work to do.

So instead of referring to myself and my family as being busy, I now think of it as having a full day when all the activities are of our choosing -- whether that means recreational activities we specifically want to do or work we agreed to take on because it’s more desirable than other possible ways of making a living, even if we might rather not be working at all. I think of “busy” as meaning the sense of a treadmill: items on the schedule that are onerous, self-perpetuating and generally unfulfilling. Having a full day, on the other hand, means a lot of generally appealing options to pursue.

Thinking about this has underscored for me how much I admire those people who don't talk about being busy, and how wary I sometimes am of those who do. Several years ago, when I worked for a large international company, I was called to serve on an ad hoc committee with our CEO. “The first available meeting time she has is in six months,” the CEO’s assistant told the rest of us as we tried to set up a meeting. This gave me an uneasy feeling. Really? The CEO was busy for six months? So who was steering the ship?

Conversely, it reminds me of the first time I met the obstetrician who later delivered both my children. On my very first appointment with him, he did a physical exam and then told me to dress and meet him in his office. When I walked into his office five minutes later, he was reading the sports section of the daily paper. I loved the fact that he was so open about not being overscheduled that he was sitting there reading the paper. It assured me that he would have time for me – which as a new patient was just what I needed to know.

I began this summer with a commitment to ease up. It’s not that I actually planned to work less – as a freelancer, I need all the work I can get right now – I just didn’t want to think quite so much about work. I wanted to think about summertime.

Now, summer is about halfway over. If nothing else, I’ve thought a lot about the extent to which “busy” is a state of mind. I have a lot to do. But I’m not willing to use the “b” word because I’m happy to be doing all of it. Busy? Not really. Just happily occupied.

Keeping busy but feeling leisurely

Last week I wrote about wanting this summer to feel more like summers used to when I was in school. Rather than working daily and trying to fit in all the same things I try to fit in the rest of the year, I wanted somehow to have a real summer break – even while filing articles on deadline and maintaining the necessary workload that guarantees a paycheck.

Taking a moment to look back a week after making that resolution, I have to say it really seems to be working. At least in part. Not because I’ve been doing so much less in any particular area of my life but just because I’ve been thinking about work less and thinking about fun more. In the past week, we’ve taken part in our town’s Old Home Day celebration, attended the annual Crawfish Boil hosted by friends of ours, gone to a minor league baseball game, attended a niece’s graduation party, watched two of Tim’s baseball games, and spent 48 hours in Portland over the July 4th holiday. That’s way more fun than I fit into an ordinary work week, and I don’t feel one bit remiss in having done all of that.

I’ve also managed to keep up with work assignments, though in truth I have a little bit less work this summer than is typical.

And so far I’ve even kept the house up reasonably well and maintained a steady supply of groceries and homemade meals for my family.

So it actually doesn’t really feel like I’m kicking back or doing any less; it just feels like my attention has shifted. I’ve just made the fun parts more of a priority, while still fitting in work and domestic duties whenever time allows.

Tim Kreider’s well-circulated essay in last Sunday’s New York Times about what he calls “the ‘busy’ trap” was particularly timely, in my case, because it reminded me that being busy is often less about meeting obligations as about setting priorities. The past week has been busy because I didn’t want to cut back on work, housework, family obligations, or fun. I was busy because I was choosing to do all of that. But somehow it didn’t feel hectic, because I was doing what I wanted to do, both in terms of work and fun. It reminded me that when I fall into the trap that Kreider describes as being “crazy busy,” it’s usually because I’ve taken on obligations I don’t really want: community projects I feel a duty to help out with but am not adequately vested in the outcome of, or the rare work assignment that feels uninspiring and mismatched to my abilities.

So in reality, I might not find myself any less busy at all this summer from a time management perspective. Long uninterrupted days of lounging on the beach will probably not happen, at least not more than once or twice. But it’s all a matter of perspective. My time will probably continue to seem full, but I’ll keep sight of the fact that I’m doing just what I choose to do. And when that’s the case, I’m beginning to realize, being busy can seem like its own kind of leisure.

The busy bustle of June

It’s that tapering-off time of year.

And yet it’s also that grand-finale time of year.

In other words, I’m not sure whether it would be more accurate to say the school year ends with a whimper or a bang; a sigh or a crash of cymbals; a quiet smile or a standing ovation.

Holly’s pottery class ended yesterday, and she brought home a paper bag full of creations: ornately glazed ceramic plates, mugs, animals, plaques, boxes. Tim has his last baseball game later this week.

The more ceremonious end-of-year events are under way as well: classroom presentations, student concerts. And also under way are the forward-looking events: fifth grade informational night is in a couple of weeks, and although I admit it’s the first school informational event yet that I’ve considered not going to – is there really anything about administrative plans for next year’s fifth grade complicated enough for me to give up a weeknight in June? –a sense of obligation toward the school and all the information dispensation it plans year in and year out will no doubt prevail.

And even as the kids’ activities taper off, I still have a task list to get me through the next three weeks: a volunteer appreciation coffee to host, a faculty/staff luncheon to oversee, a seventh grade in-school party to plan.

So when I clicked from May to June on my electronic calendar yesterday, there was a brief temptation to hyperventilate just a little. So much still left to do before school vacation starts; and then following that will come the cheerful laziness that descends over the kids as soon as the last day of school is behind them and their time is wide open.

But then I thought of another mother at our school, one who will spend the next few weeks – or longer – accompanying her son, close in age to my son, to chemotherapy sessions. She’s not worrying about baseball banquets or volunteer appreciation coffees, or even what the kids will do once vacation begins. Right now, my slightly frazzling but merry reality is a dream to her.

As I often remind myself, normalcy is the greatest luxury. Bustling around for the next three weeks means that people are having fun and celebrating the small milestones that accompany the end of every school year: milestones like finishing grade school, completing one’s first June band concert, bringing home a great report card. Having all of those little daily events taken away seldom happens for a positive reason. So we’ll make our way through the upcoming weeks, celebrating each event, and just being glad for the happy bustling frazzling overscheduled normalcy of June.

Busy Sunday

At 7:56 last night, I sat down and glanced at the clock.

7:56. I was sitting down for just a moment, but at that moment I felt like it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to avoid getting up again all evening.

But then Holly called from the shower that she needed a towel, and the dog looked like a trip outside for her might not be a bad idea, and I remembered that the clothes needed to be moved from washing machine to dryer.

It was a busy day. I arose early to write my usual one thousand words of Morning Pages. I decoded the problem I was having syncing my Google calendar with my new phone. And though the peace and quiet of the household with everyone else still asleep was blissful, I headed out for a four-mile run.

“Tell me one thing: why do we have to exercise?” a man who looked to be in his sixties and was out for a walk near the state park called out to me as I approached him.

“Funny you should ask; we were talking about that just this weekend,” I told him, which was true. “It’s because we don’t do manual labor! If we were out working in the fields all day, we wouldn’t go running!”

I finished my run and made waffles for the kids’ breakfast. Then I cleaned up the kitchen and took a shower and headed to my friend Jane’s house. She and another friend and I did a 45-minute walk in the warm midday sunlight and talked about how odd it was to have a sixty-degree November day just two weeks after an October snowstorm.

I drove back home and put in a load of laundry and swept the floors. I welcomed a new friend of Holly’s who came over to play. I figured out what to make for the next several dinners and made up a grocery list. Then it was time to go grocery shopping.

Home from the supermarket, I tried to unload groceries, talk on the phone to my mother, and make dinner all at the same time. It took a while, but I succeeded, more or less. I made meatloaf and baked potatoes stuffed with a steamed broccoli mixture, and it was one of those rare evenings when everyone not only sat down together (that’s not the rare part) but ate what was offered.

It wasn’t an unusually strenuous day. As I told the man who was out for a walk while I was running, it’s not like we were working in the fields. Or performing surgery. Or piloting a steamship or keeping a spaceship in orbit. It was just regular weekend life.

And it’s wonderful. I love all of these things: running by myself, walks with friends, cooking, taking care of the house, being with my family.

Still, I felt decadent submitting to inertia at 7:56 while Holly took a shower. But I couldn’t help it. The days are full. Still, every aspect of it had meant something to me. Fellowship. Parenthood. Nourishment. Physical well-being.

Days like this seem mundane sometimes. They aren’t the ones we remember, the way we remember vacation days or parties, say. They are just….days full of weekend-day type things.

But I wouldn’t have taken away a single part of it. Even if by 7:56 I was ready to give up on all mobility for the rest of the evening.

Yes, I was worn out, although I managed to rally enough to do what else needed to be done before bed: tucking in Holly, letting the dog out again, locking the front door. Despite not having been toiling at any kind of manual labor, I went to sleep with that invaluable sense of having done a good day’s work. Even if I have no material harvest to show for it.

Checklist

Here's how yesterday went for me:

I dropped Holly off at day camp – just two miles down the road – at 9:00. I came home, posted my daily blog entry (which I'd written the night before), made coffee, toasted a bagel, and drove Tim to his friend Will's house at 9:45. Then I headed for the supermarket. I'd promised to make cupcakes for Holly's last-day-of-camp luncheon, and the ones I'd made the night before were a disaster, so I had to buy some instead.

I was home by 11:00 and had time to make final revisions to two press releases I'd written the day before. Then at 12:00, back to Holly's day camp for the last-day reading ceremony at which each girl read her favorite piece she'd written that week.

Home in time to check emails; then I dropped Holly off at a friend's house at 2:00 and headed across town to pick Tim up at Will's house. Will's mother invited me to stay; she and two other moms were sitting by the pool snacking and chatting. I would have liked to, but with only one full work day left before we leave for vacation, I had to get home and meet some more deadlines.

Tim hadn't had lunch, so I helped him put a sandwich together and then headed out to pick up a friend's children at their day camp because medical conditions are preventing my friend from driving at the moment. I found the kids, brought them to their house, and headed back home.

Next, I contacted three sources for interviews related to the arts column I need to submit today. The topic of the column is 3D photography, and it turns out that artists who are interested in this kind of work really have a lot to say about it. I took notes as fast as I could, one eye on the clock, because I knew by 5 I had to start loading up the car to go to the transfer station.

When my phone calls were done, I headed out to the garage and started piling bags of trash and bins of recycling into the back of the car. When the car was full, I mounted one of our bikes on the bike rack; I told my sister I would deliver it to my parents' house so she could use it over the weekend. Next, on to the transfer station to unload all the trash and recycling. There I ran into the neighbor who has just started boarding cows at my parents' farm; he wanted to talk cows, so I listened to his theories about udder malfunctions and slaughter schedules while I threw trash bags into the compactor.

I was right on time to pick Holly up at her friend's house at 6:00. I loitered for a few minutes chatting with her friend's mother; then as we were leaving remembered that I was supposed to do a phone interview at 6:30 with an 11-year-old runner who plans to take part in the Chicago half-marathon next month. And Holly and I still had to drop off the bike at my parents' house. They weren't home, so we left the bike in the garage and the mail on the bench and hurried off, but halfway home, I remembered that the bike helmet was still on the seat next to me. Much to Holly's dismay, we doubled back to my parents' house and left the helmet.

The Chicago runner and his mother, both on speakerphone, called just as I was pulling into our garage. I rushed inside to start up my laptop so I could take notes. It's a good story; I'm looking forward to writing it up.

Once that call was over, I indulged in a rush of relief. All my scheduled events for the day were done; moreover, I'd left the house six different times for six different pre-scheduled drop-offs or pick-ups and hadn't forgotten or even been late for a single one. I'd also met a number of small but necessary work goals for the day: finished the press releases, done the interviews for my arts column and the marathon article.

So then I washed the dishes, put away food, and did the dreaded chore of removing mouse droppings from the cabinet under the sink. It seems every three or four days, I find enough down there to warrant a clean-up. I don't understand why, because there's no food under the sink and I never find evidence of mice anywhere else in the kitchen or the rest of the house. It's as if they wiggle their way through the hole near the drainpipe, wander into the cabinet for the sole purpose of pooping, and disappear again. My friend Sheila recently told me about a new mouse repellent she's very happy with; I'll have to put it on my To Do list for today to get to the hardware store where Sheila found it and buy some.

Ah yes, today's To Do list. Because every 24 hours, there's a new one. I managed to get through a lot yesterday, but today there are still more work assignments to complete, more errands to run, more household jobs to do. And yet yesterday felt like a particularly notable accomplishment; I was pleased with the way all the pieces had fit together – the six rides, the transfer station, moving the bike – and rather than feeling beleaguered by all that needed to be done, I was pleased that it had all turned out to be manageable and, more importantly, that I hadn't forgotten anyone anywhere.

When I was younger, before I had children, I honestly believed there were secrets, keys, to good organizational skills, and all I had to do was read the right book or attend the right lecture with the right expert and then I too would understand how to Be Organized. I even occasionally signed up for personal organization classes. Eventually I grew skeptical that there was any one answer, but these days I look around and feel a sense of accomplishment. It's not anything I learned from a book, and it's not anything I could write a book about either. It's not any particular key or slogan or trick or shortcut. It's just...living your life. Meeting your obligations. Keeping track of it all.

And it turns out that experience really is the best possible teacher.

Busy day

By seven thirty last night, I felt like a character in a Richard Scarry picture book. Except much sweatier and with less colorful clothes. But just as busy busy busy. And when it was time to leave to take Holly to her evening library program, I was very sad to wave goodbye to my uneaten dinner.

After I’d worked frantically to complete an article about Fourth of July observances throughout the region, a morning phone interview for which I’d slotted a typical 45 minutes started fifteen minutes late and lasted an hour and a quarter, so by the time I hung up it was noon, and I’d promised Holly a trip to the drugstore before the morning was over (I knew my best bet at getting her to apply sunscreen on a regular basis was if I let her pick out the sunscreen herself, a decision she would doubtlessly base on the color and shape of the bottle).

Back from our CVS run, I made lunch for her and Tim, and then it was time to bring Holly to a friend’s house for the afternoon. I tried not to think too much about Rick’s dire comment that the warning light on the Prius indicated that one of the tires was leaking air and would soon be flat. Just one more trip, I mentally urged the car, and then I promise our next stop will be the mechanic.

But Holly’s friend had just moved to North Chelmsford, and while Chelmsford borders on Carlisle, North Chelmsford borders on Lowell. Needless to say, with my notorious sense of direction, I left North Chelmsford and headed the wrong way; soon I was crossing out of Dracut and into Methuen, rather than out of South Chelmsford and into Carlisle as I’d hoped.

Through Lowell, around the UMass campus, through Dracut, into Methuen, turn around retrace steps, and finally I was on the highway heading toward our mechanic in Littleton. One wrong turn in Littleton, easily corrected at a gas station, and finally I was there…with fifteen minutes to spare before I needed to pick Tim up back at home and bring him to his Little League game in Arlington. I explained my plight to the service department. “The tire pressure warning light is on, but I got lost on the way here and I have no time at all,” I bemoaned.

The technician looked up my records. “You got lost coming from Carlisle to Littleton?” he asked.

“No, I was in Chelmsford but ended up in Methuen.”

“Well, you can’t keep driving around on that tire,” he said. “We’ll get to it as quickly as we can.”

I called Tim and told him to fill his water bottle, put on his uniform, assemble his bat bag and be ready when I returned because we’d have to go straight to the game. I sat on pins and needles in the waiting room, wreaked with anxiety, trying to tell myself again and again that there was simply nothing to do but wait it out. I reminded myself that this was trivial: a car repair, a baseball game; nothing to develop a migraine over. But still, I knew what Rick would say: poor planning. Somehow I should have figured out how to line up the whole day more effectively.

The technician called me over. The tire was repaired, and it was cheap, which was a welcome surprise. I drove to Carlisle, picked up Tim, drove to Arlington, and dropped him off at the field nine minutes before first pitch. The players are supposed to arrive 45 minutes early for warm-ups, but since Rick is normally in charge of baseball transportation for Tim, this was the first time all season – actually probably ever – that he’d arrived late, so I knew he’d be forgiven this once.

Home at last, but I hadn’t yet run my daily mile, so out I went to do that. With a half-hour left before I needed to meet up with Holly for an evening program at the library, I made my go-to quick-meal recipe: pasta with sautéed garlic, cherry tomatoes, arugula and walnuts. Just as I was about to take my first bite of pasta, the phone rang: it was the man who had taken over Old Home Day pie contest duties for me this year, after I decided that I needed a break from that annual responsibility, and he had a lot of questions. I cast longing glances at my plate of pasta as I explained how to prepare the tasting plates for the judges and why I thought the final score should be averaged rather than cumulative. “It’s a pie contest,” I wanted to tell him. “Just do it however you want. It really doesn’t matter.” But I answered his questions as well as I could and then left for the library.

We got home a little before nine and I had time then to eat. The tire was repaired; Tim’s baseball game was over; Holly had enjoyed the library program; my Fourth of July article was filed. Busy day, just like in a Richard Scarry book. But it all ended well. And the pasta was absolutely delicious.

When you're too busy to go running...go running anyway

I was too busy to run yesterday. So I did the best thing to do when you’re too busy to run. Avid runners will know exactly what I’m talking about. What’s the best thing to do when you’re too busy to go running? No, not use the treadmill. Not take the day off and double your workout the next day. Not even concede gracefully to the reality that there are days into which a run just might not fit and refuse to dwell on the fact that you didn’t go.

No. At least speaking for myself, the best thing to do when I’m too busy to run is…go running.

I may seem like the wrong person to talk about making a choice to run. As a USRSA-registered streak runner, I’ve committed to run a mile or more every day. In another month, if all goes well, my running streak with be one thousand days long. But yesterday was one of those days when it was so tempting to tell myself, “Okay, but just a mile today. You can spare ten minutes, but that’s it. You have way too much to do to fit in a good run. Just do that mile and get back to your desk…your kitchen…your telephone…your errands list.”

But I didn’t. I’d spent the first 90 minutes of the day up at the elementary school attending Holly’s class’s Iditarod presentation. And while I love being invited into the classroom, starting my work day 90 minutes late is never something that feels great to me, devotee of routine that I am. I was feeling frazzled by waiting to hear from two different sources for two different articles whose input I urgently needed in order to complete and file my stories. When I got back from the classroom event, I had three e-mails saying that school library volunteers had to reschedule their shifts, which is my responsibility as library volunteer coordinator. I wasn’t at all sure that my older child had finished a big homework assignment due later this week, and I hadn’t even started the brainstorming part of an essay I promised an editor I’d draft in the early part of this week.

That was just the deskwork part. On the domestic front, I had committed to make two batches of oatmeal cookies for events taking place that afternoon, and we’d invited a guest to dinner. Though I had a general idea of the menu, I hadn’t done any of the cooking yet. I hadn’t even checked very carefully to ensure we had the ingredients I needed.

And, of course, as a streak-runner, I knew I had to fit in my run at some point. Even if it was only ten minutes long.

Instead, I took a leap of faith. I said to myself, “Deadlines, dinner menus, kids’ homework, housework…no. Just go running. So you don’t have time to run. Just Go Anyway.”

So I set off on my favorite weekday loop. But instead of getting more frazzled as the time away from my desk and home unspooled, I found that the opposite was happening. As I ran, I thought about the dinner menu and what I’d need to prepare when, in order to be ready when our guest arrived. I remembered that I hadn’t bought any salad ingredients but I did have some leftover steamed broccoli, which I could sauté with tomatoes and corn in place of a salad. I mulled over ideas for the essay I’d promised my editor. I reassured myself that the two story sources I urgently needed to hear from would probably call later in the day. I reminded myself that now Tim is in fifth grade, he almost always gets his assignments done without asking for a lot of help or making a big deal of it, and this was probably one of those times.

Seasoned runners will be able to anticipate how this ended: when I returned home after the run, even though I’d squandered a half-hour that I really didn’t have to spare, I felt better about all of it. I was all set to start dinner preparations, having planned out in my mind what needed to be done. With my brain rejuvenated, I felt that I could call the tardy story sources and ask them for the information I was waiting on, and I could at least start jotting down ideas for the essay even if I didn’t start drafting it yet.

So, once again, the best thing to do when I was too frazzled to fit in a run was to fit in that run. After that, time seemed to shift and work its way into my hands again, where I felt capable of organizing it the way I needed to. I’d run the frazzle goblins right into the ground. Literally. Mentally refreshed, my afternoon no longer seemed quite so overbooked. I felt great. And not even all that busy after all.