In my last post, I mentioned a book I was reading called, “The Joy of Doing Nothing”, that discusses the benefits of taking time each day to find ways to detach and well, do nothing. By doing so, you would increase your productivity and there would be positive benefits to your mental health.

I’ve been taking these daily breaks for a long time now and I break them into two categories. For me, they are either to recharge or to pause and notice the moments going on around me. We get so busy being busy that we forget to notice the daily tidbits that happen all around us. Those tidbits are what changes the day from being the same old thing – get up, work, get supper, finish up work and go to bed – to being a day full of things to talk about that are beyond the grumbles of the regular routine.

For me, in this season of life, the early morning hours are my recharge time, or moments to do nothing. I’m fried at the end of the day and I’m aware of the to-do list that did not get accomplished by the end of each day, so I would use the evening hours for accomplishing, not recharging, if I stayed up.

But in the early morning hours, I have a whole day ahead of me with the fresh promise of accomplishing everything I will set out to, even if I never have before. I still believe. The early morning hours fill me with the slow energy of the world waking up around me. In the colder months, I sit in the dark with my coffee and look out a window listening to the heater keep our home warm. My cat is always by my side purring. And that is it. No other sounds from my home. My brain needs that quiet to recharge.

Winter feels like it is lasting longer than normal this year and I have noticed that I am antsy to get outside in the mornings. My favorite way to recharge in the morning is to sit outside with my coffee and listen to the world as it wakes up around me. As luck would have it, we were blessed to have a few teaser warm days recently and I brought my recharging self outside on one of the warm mornings and my soul hit new levels of recharging. Being out in nature, even if it is just barely sitting outside my back door tucked in a bathrobe trying to hide from all of the new residences going up around me so I can keep pretending we live in a field, is my fave. The birds were as happy as I was and were incredibly noisy, as they always seem to be in springtime. It was loud. But it was wonderful. It wasn’t noise that required anything of me so I could sit with my coffee and soak it all in. And it was warmer. Ahhhhh.

Recharging is for the birds. I needed them.

Then it snowed.

And it iced.

And I lamented my forced retreat back into the closed up house to recharge. Still more winter ahead.

But then I discovered that the birds were still tweeting outside, even with the snow.

I have been housebound with a sick wee one and he felt that he needed fresh air (his mother’s kid for sure) so I opened a window. As I sat in the moment with him, I could hear the birds tweeting away. That connection to the birds and the outside world was a great recharge moment when I was feeling a bit cooped up.

Then he fell asleep and I eventually was freezing because I couldn’t close the window and make noise to wake him up. He was toasty warm under blankets and he was actually breathing well and not sniffly, so it seemed that the fresh air really was what he needed. I wasn’t about to change that because I was a bit of a weenie.

Alas…there will be more snow tomorrow so I’ll be snuggled up listening to the heater in my house as I recharge for a bit longer but that moment outside recharging with the birds is where I am headed soon. And since I still have a sick wee one with me, we may open that window again for some fresh air and I bet those birds will still be out there tweeting. Apparently, they are warriors not weenies.

Where will you recharge today?