Can any day be a perfect day?
Celebrating my 35th birthday with a classic journal prompt, exploring what it means to build a life of simple, well-balanced, just-right days.
As I began this essay, it was my 35th birthday and I woke up in paradise in St. Maarten, surrounded by best friends who I’ve been traveling with annually for over a decade. I was up before dawn and watched the sunrise with Ben, then wrote in my journal while drinking an espresso. We went for a jog down at the beach, saw some birds and some donkeys, then capped it off at a local French bakery, Lulus, run by our Airbnb host, Virginie. She treated us to breakfast, the best banana bread I’ve ever had in my life.
It all sounds too perfect to be real, and almost comically so. A part of me feels even a little bashful sharing it. I feel fortunate and grateful for this vacation we got to take together and in the classic Taurean manner, I’ve never had a hard time taking time off. I enjoy good food and luxuriating in optimal temperatures near bodies of water while feeling cared for and exerting very little energy. It is my natural place!
That said, a shift began to happen a couple of years ago where I started to feel less inclined to escape my life to seek out novelty, relaxation, and play. In a sense, these luxuries became more integrated into my daily routine. I started being able to take short hikes after work or before work, to cook food at home that felt simple and nourishing, to find everyday ways of exploring and adventuring, and to spend more time slowly building a business and offerings on a schedule that I controlled. My body became more aware of when I truly needed rest and recuperation and I’d seize the moments I needed to take it.
I once heard a stat that more than half of Americans don’t use their paid time off. They just work instead of not working, even when they are paid regardless. I scarcely believe that this is because all Americans are so deeply in love with their jobs. That said, I’m also not sold on the model our current culture pushes around PTO. I don’t believe it’s efficient or healthy to work 40 to 60 hours per week only to take approximately 5-6 days of vacation twice per year. (This is not to mention that the United States doesn’t guarantee its workers paid vacation days or paid holidays and nearly a third of U.S. workers don’t have PTO).
Outside of my yoga and writing business, I’ve worked in similar professional roles in social media for the past 2+ years. One year was as a “full-time” temporary/hourly employee treated essentially as a freelancer who worked 30 hours per week and had no PTO. The other was while a full-time employee at 40 hours/week with “unlimited PTO,” which amounted to about 15-20 days per year.
At my freelance job, I took roughly the same number of days off (but wasn’t paid for them), and I did the same volume of client work but worked about 5-6 hours/day on weekdays. During this time, I got sick fewer times (basically never), and felt healthier and mentally more balanced versus in my current full-time, 8am-4pm/M-F role.
When I started my current full-time job, one of the questions my manager asked me was what I needed to be successful at my job, and my answer was that I needed to prioritize my morning routine: some kind of movement, meditation, and time outdoors before work. Despite my current employer mostly honoring my wishes for my schedule/hours/time zone, it’s very challenging to work 8 hours each day and still maintain the practices and creative outlets I need to feel balanced, especially while caring for and exercising my dog several hours a day. I cannot imagine how people add childcare into this mix. Truthfully, I think the answer is that they don’t balance it all, they instead suffer — creatively, developmentally, and health-wise.
My take-away has been that by working fewer weekly hours in a day as a freelancer, I got the same amount of billable work done but felt far more aligned with an Ayurvedic and supportive rhythm to my days. I believe that this was mostly due to the maintenance of my preferred schedule and not having to sacrifice my early morning routines or self-care practices to join early east coast calls.
As a result of my experience, it’s my strong opinion that the average knowledge worker would have the same increase in productivity that I have at a 4-day work week, or by trimming their workdays to 6 hours versus the standard 8 hours. I feel this is the bare minimum adjustment we could make to increase wellness in our society and I will absolutely die on this hill. So far the data in the UK has shown this to be true.
So there we were, on vacation, and it reminded me about a cultural impulse that we have to cram all the best stuff into our time when we’re on PTO. Because we deserve it, right?! Because this is what we worked so hard for!! So on vacation, you get to have "the perfect day” every day: the MOST novelty, the MOST decadence, the MOST play. But honestly…for me, it’s exhausting. This wouldn’t have perhaps struck me so much if I also didn’t have the data to prove it. In the last year, I became a Garmin device user and one of the data points I most closely track and pay attention to is the Body Battery score.
The Body Battery metric is based on a few factors, which include your stress, heart rate variability, and activity levels. As Adam Sinicki writes, “HRV is a useful measurement of sympathetic nervous system dominance. The sympathetic nervous system is responsible for the ‘fight or flight’ response and is associated with increased heart rate, suppressed immunity, digestion, and anxiety, among other things. Normally, when we exhale, we become slightly more parasympathetic, meaning our body slightly relaxes. This is indicated by a slight decrease in heart rate, providing us with ‘variability.’”
Typically it’s found that stress causes your heart rate variability to drop, therefore correlating what I call “unproductive” or non-exercise-related stress with lowered HRV. Of course, I always take these data points into account with my actual body’s sensations and experiences, but 90%+ of the time I find my Garmin is accurate. When my Body Battery is low, I feel low energy. When I wake up with a lower Body Battery, I feel like garbage. Nearly always, this happens when I’m traveling, if my sleep is disturbed (e.g., if my bedroom is too hot), if I have more than 2 alcoholic drinks the day before, or when I eat until I’m feeling stuffed at dinner time.
Here is my Body Battery rise and fall on an average week with my normal work routine and drinking only Saturday night (note the drop on Sunday):
Here is my Body Battery rise and fall on a recent trip to DC/Virginia while on PTO and staying with family (my body battery bottomed out by the afternoon on most of these days which is never a good sign):
And here is my body battery rise and fall on my recent trip to trip to St. Maarten (my best body battery charge on this trip was on the plane ride back):
As we approached the end of our stay, my crew asked what I wanted to do for my birthday, which was the last full day of our trip, and I told them I wanted to write. The idea of sitting down to work on this essay was far more appealing than relaxing at a beach club under a cabana with a tropical alcoholic beverage. In fact, I felt creatively constipated only doing relaxing or indulgent activities, and you can see it in the graph above! I craved some form of effort or labor, some creative outlet. (I was also literally constipated, and that is all the proof I really need that all of this mind-body stuff is connected. You’re welcome for the TMI.)
On my birthday, I was inspired to repeat a journaling exercise that I’ve tried in the past on retreat and wanted to revisit. It’s called ‘The Perfect Day” exercise.
The way you do the Perfect Day exercise is that you close your eyes and of course, imagine the perfect day.
What happens as you wake up?
What are the sights, smells, and sounds?
Where do you wake up? Who are you with? What do you do?
What do you eat and where do you go?
What happens at the beginning, middle, and end of your day?
How do you feel throughout the day?
Here is how my entry started (here is my full entry on Notion if you want to save and do it yourself):
“I wake up with the sunrise, which isn’t a struggle because I went to bed early. My body battery is fully charged and naturally, my skin is therefore glowing. I take a few steps outside onto the patio to watch the sunrise. The dogs are calmly leading the way to the door, and they’re perfectly behaved. It’s quiet and serene, aside from the occasional canine input and the croons and chirps of neighborhood birds. The air is cool on my skin. I feel that time slows down as I let my gaze draw along the horizon, and I write my morning pages.”
My friends, who appreciate the weirdo that I am, left me at our out-of-a-magazine, decidedly-not-average-ocean-view-house to write based on my wishes. There was plenty of material all around to inspire a perfect day that was divine, exotic, and extravagant. Instead, I imagined waking up at home back in Tucson. I described a day that was reasonably normal and borderline average. Perhaps it was an extra-awesome and well-balanced day, a Friday that might pass me by if I wasn’t slowing down enough to realize how magical it was, with activities that I can do in my neighborhood and with my loved ones.
I feel grateful that I’ve built that kind of life, and it reminded me to rethink the impulse to convince myself that something better is ahead if only I work hard or long enough or prove myself more.
The ingredients for my perfect day are within reach. Time in nature and with my people and animals, enough work but not too much, laughter and play, time by myself to create, and good rest.
When I use my energies wisely, aligned with the ways nature intended, my perfect day is so much simpler. And that day can be any day.
A Playlist for My Perfect Day
After my birthday dinner at a place called Java, we came back to the house and my friends helped me construct the playlist below. It’s based on my perfect day. Enjoy!!
Hi Kelly! I loved reading your perfect day vision and am excited to try these journaling prompts. I also read your linked manifesting an aligned career vision and was curious, what test/site did you use to get those results at the bottom?