Retreat Life & Reflection
For years, my calendar was a runaway train.
Meeting after meeting. Day after day. My assistant would beg me to slow down, and we’d try, and somehow it would fill right back up again. The work always had a reason. The work always had urgency. The work always had someone counting on me.
I did put “me time” on the calendar sometimes. But it was defiance. A little act of rebellion against the machine I had built. Not love. Not me saying, you matter. It was me saying, not today, not this one hour. There’s a difference.
A couple of years ago, I started putting lunch on the calendar and actually protecting it. Small, but real. I didn’t get much further than that.
Then I closed The Moriah Group.
And the calendar went quiet in a way I wasn’t prepared for.
I expected relief. What came instead was disorientation. I would go to my desk because there was work to do for Ayoku, but my brain wouldn’t let me perform. I sat there and felt unproductive and scared. I kept asking myself the question I was too afraid to say out loud. What if I never get out of this rut?
I met with my business coach. She listened and then she said something that stopped me. She told me I was putting too much pressure on myself. That this new season wasn’t about producing. It was about unlearning. About reshaping my entire relationship with work. And then she gave me an assignment.
Do something creative, something fun, something healing every single day for two weeks. That’s it. That’s the work.
I planted an herb garden. I hung art on my walls. I ate leisurely breakfasts with nowhere to be. I started doing HIIT workouts on YouTube in my living room. I journaled. I worked on my book. I organized my bedroom. I went to get a haircut and on a whim, decided on a mani/pedi before coming home.
None of it was on a deliverable. None of it had a deadline. Every single bit of it was just for me.
And somewhere inside those two weeks, something shifted. My nervous system started to remember what it felt like to not be on. My days started to have a different texture. I started to understand, for the first time in a long time, what I actually liked. What fed me. What I had been starving myself of while I fed everything else.
That’s when I built the new calendar. Not from a productivity system. From that knowing.
A four-day professional week, and I mean it. Time blocks that breathe. Quiet mornings for breakfast, prayer, and a call with my sister Janelle. Fridays for spiritual study and whatever errands actually feed my soul. Workouts in the evenings. Lunch, every day, locked in.
I didn’t stumble into this. I curated it. Not out of exhaustion or rebellion this time. Out of love for myself.
That part still surprises me. For thirty years I knew how to build a calendar around the work. It turns out I had to lose the work, sit in the scary quiet, plant some herbs, and get a spontaneous mani/pedi before I figured out how to build one around myself.
I’m still learning what it feels like to choose myself not because I have nothing left to give, but because I deserve it when I’m full.
What does it look like when you choose yourself from a place of love rather than survival?
