The Blank Day

On wandering, noticing, and giving yourself room to just be home

I want to tell you about something I tried recently. And I want to recommend you try it too.

I gave myself a completely blank day at home.

Not a spa day. Not a social plan. Not a productivity-lite version of rest where I still managed to squeeze in three errands and a workout. A genuinely blank day. Nowhere to be. Nothing on the list. Just me, my space, and the question I kept asking myself throughout: what do I actually want to do right now?

It sounds simple. It is not as easy as it sounds.

Here’s what the day looked like.

I drank my coffee slowly, in a different spot than usual. I wandered out into the back garden and pulled some weeds. I laid down on the grass for a bit. Talked to the neighbors. Wandered back in and picked up a craft project I hadn’t even started yet, one that had been sitting there waiting patiently for me to have a moment, and I just... did it for a while. Then I stopped and made myself some lunch. Watched a couple of episodes of a show I’d fallen behind on. And then moved on to the next thing.

There was no next thing planned. There was just the next thing I felt drawn to.

Oliver has NO PROBLEM with a day at home.

And here’s what I noticed most. I never once reached for my phone to scroll. Not because I was disciplined about it. Because I was busy. Not frenetic, frantic, gotta be productive busy. Just genuinely occupied with what I actually wanted to do in that moment. Moving from one thing to the next in my own time, in my own space, at my own pace.

By the end of the day I was so rested I could feel it in my bones. The next morning I was genuinely ready to be productive for a few hours and then go meet friends. That is not how I usually feel after a Saturday.

We talk a lot about staycations. We talk about self care and rest and all the things we should be doing to protect our energy. And most of that is good advice. But I think we skip over something.

We live in our homes. For a lot of us, we also work in them. We keep them clean and tidy. We take care of the people and the pets in them. We take care of ourselves inside them. We pay the bills and keep the heat on and open the windows in the morning and close them at night and do all the ten thousand things that living requires.

And yet we rarely just wander around them. We rarely look up and notice the space we’re actually in.

There is something about being home, really being home, that your nervous system recognises.

It knows you’re safe. It knows you’re not performing. It knows you don’t have to be anywhere or anything other than what you are right now. And when you give it a full day of that, without filling it with noise or obligation or the low hum of everyone else’s thoughts coming through your phone, something loosens.

We spend so much time making sure we know what the whole world is thinking. We don’t give ourselves nearly enough time to wonder what we think.

The blank day at home is not nothing. It might actually be the antidote. To the craziness in the world, to the pull of the phone, to the particular exhaustion of being always available and never quite still.

Give yourself a day like this. No plan. No destination. Just your space, your time, and the honest question of what you actually feel like doing.

Wander a little. Notice your home. Let yourself be in it.

You might be surprised what you find when you stop looking for something to distract you and just let yourself be there.