Here we are — the in-between time after Christmas and before New Year’s Day. A friend told me this is the one week of the year she intentionally hits the pause button.

“I once stayed in my pajamas for three days,” she said.

Another friend chimed in, “Not me. I rearrange my entire house, pack up my Christmas decorations, and clean out the closets.”

I’m leaning toward Friend Number One’s choice.

Flannel PJs and nubby socks are totally within reach since I’m off from work this week. Yet, there’s an incessant buzzing sound in a tidy corner of my compulsive brain firing off like a Martha Stewart alarm.

What about that list of things to get done, missy? They won’t organize themselves! Sorting through the storage room. Setting up 2018 appointments. Getting ahead in my columns (Dave and Jim would second this motion.) And, yes, packing up Christmas decorations and cleaning out the closets.

In the past, I’ve done both — been a couch potato and couch cleaner. Both were satisfying. But, I tend to err on the side of doing more than dallying. It’s just how I’m wired. I swear I had a day planner in my crib. Heck, I had a day planner in middle school, before day planners were a thing. After school, I’d rush home to pull out my make-shift planner of a black-and-white bound composition notebook. Homework? Check. Practice piano? Check. Pine away for the boy in math class who doesn’t know I’m alive? Double check.

Geesh.

Writing this, I think how helpful it would have been to tell middle-school Amy to chill a bit. Take a break. Call a girlfriend and gossip for a few hours, then read a teen magazine and procrastinate writing an English paper. But, don’t, for the love of Levenger, schedule out every minute of the day.

Then I think of one of my favorite writers, Annie Dillard, who wrote in A Writing Life:

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order – willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living.”

That sounds about right. Balance in all things. I rather like the notion that this in-between week can serve as both respite and restoration.

For several years, a group of friends gathered on New Year’s Eve day to work on dream posters. We lined up blank canvases on the kitchen island and sketched and painted our hopes and dreams for the year about to begin. I was always inspired by their creations, each one unique and personal. What’s funny is I can’t remember the context of most of my posters throughout the years, but I can tell you about those of my friends. And a lot of their dreams became reality, not because of some cosmic intent a la The Secret, but, rather, because those novice artists worked their tooshes off to make them so.

I stopped making dream posters a few years ago because they felt like one more thing to do during the holiday season so I called an audible and took a break. Hey, I took a break! See? It’s not so hard.

So, the in-between week ebbs and flows on the scale of what to fill it with. Which may be the most beautiful part about a time that gives you the choice to savor the solace between the known and the hoped for.