Retreat Life & Reflection
I moved into my house eight months ago.
In that time I have worked on nearly every room. The guest room. The kids’ rooms. The bonus room where friends gather. I even organized the attic.
The attic.
My bedroom was last. Four moving bags of clothes were still sitting in the corner, untouched. Unopened boxes of toiletries on the dresser. I walked past the clutter every single day and told myself I’d get to it. The mess was annoying. I just lived with it anyway.
Because that’s what putting yourself last looks like in real life. It’s not dramatic. It’s a corner of clothes you never unpack. It’s your own space being the only space that can wait.
This week, I decided it was done. I gave two full days to my bedroom and nothing else.
And when I finished, I stood in the doorway of my own room and felt something I hadn’t expected. Peace. The kind that feels like a luxury hotel. Like a warm hug.
I had been giving that feeling to everyone else’s spaces for eight months. Turns out it was waiting for me the whole time.
Visioning was my unpacked bedroom. I walked past it every day and kept going. For years, I wanted more time for dreaming. The kind of slow, expansive thinking that actually builds something new. But my days filled up fast with what was urgent, what was on fire, what couldn’t wait. The ratio of putting out fires to building a new vision was so far out of balance I stopped noticing it was supposed to be different.
I don’t think I’m alone in this. I think a lot of us who lead are living in the equivalent of an unpacked bedroom. The strategy session keeps getting bumped. The vision document sits in a folder untouched. The thinking work, the work that is actually yours, waits while everything else gets handled.
And we tell ourselves we’ll get to it. When things slow down. When the team is more stable. When the crisis passes. Or worse, we tack it onto the end of the day, laboring over the vision into the wee hours of the morning, when our brains are tired and not at their best.
But the crisis doesn’t pass. It just changes shape.
What it costs is hard to measure until you’re on the other side of it. The decisions made from exhaustion instead of clarity. The strategies built at midnight when your best thinking checked out hours ago. The vision that stays blurry because it only ever gets the leftover hours.
What I know now is that the vision work has to be protected the same way I protect everything else on my calendar. Not squeezed in. Not saved for later. Blocked, named, and defended. I don’t let other things eat away at the edges of that time anymore. Not urgent requests. Not one more meeting. Not the pull of whatever is loudest that day.
That time is mine. And what gets built inside of it is better because of that.
What would it look like to give two days to the thing in your work that’s been sitting in the corner?
