Second-hand House
If You Need to Re-Center This Weekend, There’s One Timeless Solution: Take a Walk
Apartment Therapy Weekend Projects is a guided program designed to help you get the happy, healthy home you’ve always wanted, one weekend at a time. Sign up now for email updates so you never miss a lesson.
Weekend Projects
If you celebrate, this weekend is the last stretch of time to get stuff done before the Christmas holiday. There are so many necessary and perceived-as-necessary tasks left on the to-do list and the bucket list and the list of lists and you wonder if there’s enough time to do them all with still enough time to, you know, stop and soak it all in like you’re supposed to.
And then there are the people who are around who usually aren’t, whether it’s family and friends visiting from out of town or the kids who are on winter break—or both! It’s special, it’s wonderful, you look forward to it all year, but it’s squishy and noisy and messy and you feel like you need a bit of space to breathe and regain that grateful, in-the-moment perspective.
There’s one simple, re-calibrating solution, and this weekend, we’re going to make it happen.
This Weekend: Take a walk.
Taking a walk (or a roll, or just taking a quiet moment inside the house) can do so much to bring you back to the best version of yourself.
When you step outside for a walk, you leave behind whatever is going on at your house, the good and the bad, the togetherness and the overwhelm, the wonderful things you’ve done to cozy everything up and the waiting pile of unwrapped gifts, the food you’ve prepared and the niggling mess in the sink.
You get farther and farther from any introspective whisper of inadequacy and the thrum of vaguely anxious frustration. You create a healthy distance from the pressure to enjoy every fleeting minute.
You become more and more grounded with each step you take. The rustle of dry branches, the whip of cold wind on your face, and the steady clop of your boot-shod feet pull you into the comfortable, comforting embrace of the here and now. You stay in this headspace and you keep walking.
You circle back and your front door comes back into sight. You get closer and it gets bigger as you approach your threshold emptied but full. The things that don’t matter have fallen to the wayside and the things that do are brimming in your heart. Deep breath. Turn the knob. One more step. Welcome home.
Weekend Projects
You can catch up with weekend projects right here . Share your progress with us and others by posting updates and photos on Instagram and Twitter with the hashtag #atweekendproject .
Remember: This is about improvement, not perfection. Each week you can either choose to work on the assignment we’ve sent you, or tackle another project you’ve been meaning to get to. It’s also completely okay to skip a weekend if you’re busy or not feeling the assignment.
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