Periodically, I decide to be firm with myself, to pull myself together, as if I could slam myself like a load of clay onto a wheel, in a great lump, to be shaped into coherence.

I made that decision last night, once again, as I have many, many times. It’s a sort of New Year’s resolution, and though it provides the same sense of comfort and usefulness, it is also just as likely to remain undone.

So as I was getting myself settled on my new mattress, I thought vaguely, “I need to take myself in hand,” and a vivid image glowed in my head of what exactly that meant.

It was an image of a day filled with doing things, like cleaning my bathrooms, organizing my kitchen cabinets, cleaning the room that belongs to my grandson when he comes over, and tackling all the things on my task list (writing, sewing, finding, discarding, inventing). The specifics don’t matter, really; it’s more the idea of doing one thing and then immediately doing another, instead of sitting down in my nice recliner with my serious cat in my lap, passing the time until one sleep or another, instead of wandering out of the house for a nice walk with no particular destination.

I did, in fact, get some things done yesterday, I hasten to add. Every day, for instance, I write in my journal, write a blog post, take a long walk, exercise, and scrape the cat litter. Yesterday, specifically, I folded laundry and put it away. I also took a long bus ride to King of Prussia Mall, where I bought two sheet sets and a light cotton quilt, and promptly took the bus back.

Also, I talked to a couple of friends who needed help. One is grieving for her mother; the help I can give her is merely to say that grief is quixotic and individual, and that it’s all right to be a difficult person. I told her I wrote a whole book about grief, though it masquerades as a fantasy novel, and sent her a link to the Kindle edition. She told me she bought it.

The other friend is having an operation today, and though she had lined up another friend with a car to pick her up afterwards, she couldn’t reach the friend. I told her (I don’t have a car myself) I would take the bus to the hospital and we would catch a Lyft together. Luckily, it turned out she didn’t need me after all.

But the rest of my day yesterday was spent in neutral, wheels spinning lazily, not going anywhere. I hasten to say I have had days like that all my life; they are not a feature of retirement. Retirement, however, removes the ominous pressure from outside, the knowledge that I am letting someone down and not earning my keep when I disengage. But it also seems to take away some of the pleasure of avoiding obligations.

One of the things I loved about teaching was that there was always, always, something to do, some problem to solve, or rather many problems, all at once. The challenge was to decide which problems were important and which were not, and to figure out ways to solve the important ones simultaneously. That was a lot of fun. It also explains why the first few weeks of summer vacation were spent in a daze of anxious lethargy, of bewildered recovery from the pressurized sprint that is a school year. I could not sustain that kind of driven obsessiveness today.

Now when it’s entirely up to me to figure out what to do, and up to me to set the assignments. Today, the family is coming over for dinner, as they do most Thursdays, but the son-in-law has promised to order pizza. Tomorrow is trash day, and along with the usual containers I have to get a mattress out on the sidewalk, wrapped in a plastic bag that I have ordered from Amazon. I should call the ophthalmologist; I should schedule a donation pickup; I should break all the cardboard boxes in my basement up and get them ready for recycling; I should really, really, clean the second floor bathroom. I want to work on a project that has been languishing for a year. I am getting a better idea for how to approach my latest novel, and I really should make notes about that.

I may do all of those things, though probably not. I may get some of them done, plus others that haven’t occurred to me yet. But it’s not the task list that matters.

It’s that picture I have in my head, of me doing first one thing, and then another, so. that the busy little Calvinist in the back of my brain stops reproaching me and so that I can look about me at my little house and see all that I have made, and that it is good, and then–and only then–sit down to relax in my recliner, with my cat, to waste some serious time.