Sometimes you just need to sleep 12 hours, eat food you know isn’t the best for you, pet a cat, and spend time with people who you love and who love you.  Fight past your initial, cerebral worries that you aren’t doing what you should be doing, because maybe our needs and our cognitive “shoulds” don’t always match up.

Try as we might, not everything we do and not everyone we spend time with will be good for us or will help us “in the long run”.  But, I think that that’s okay.  We can’t always be moving forward–sometimes we have to take steps back in order to make our progression more meaningful.

And maybe the feeling of things ultimately working out and being okay can be attributed to my youth.  I feel like I have time on my side, though I know that life is unexpected and days move by much more quickly than I’d like.  At twenty-three, I think I’ve experienced quite a lot, and still nothing at all.  Despite so many forces working against me as a womxn and as a person of color, I am privileged in so many ways, and that’s probably another reason for my air of confidence in time.

Regardless of what it is, I’m sure that even in our crazed panic to get things done, we can accomplish a lot more if we take the time to consider what we really want or need each day.

I hope that this week’s playlist can help you do that.  Try to set aside ten or fifteen minutes for you to just think–not about the tasks you need to finish before 5PM rolls around, but about how your body and mind is feeling.  You also deserve the time and care you put into the things and people around you.  And if you want to start a new Netflix series instead of “being productive”, maybe you should do it, just this once.

Background daisy globe image comes from Pinterest.