The lake was still dark that first morning, well before the rest of the house was up — the first full day of a week that had been blocked off for months, with nothing written into it. No meeting to prepare for. No drive to make. And within twenty minutes, the kayak rack was being reorganized in the cold — the paddles restacked by size, a phone checked for nothing in particular, a mental list started of small repairs the dock could probably use before Labor Day.
Nobody had asked for any of this. The week had been built, deliberately, to have nothing in it.
Seneca noticed something similar two thousand years before lake houses in Litchfield County existed. In On the Shortness of Life, he described people who fill every hour of leisure with an imitation of business — rearranging what doesn't need rearranging, generating errands out of nothing, because unstructured time turns out to be harder to occupy than a full schedule ever was. He didn't think this was laziness working in reverse. He thought it was closer to fear: an inability to be left alone with oneself once the tasks that usually stand between a person and that encounter have been cleared away.
The dock repairs were real, in the sense that dock repairs are always technically available to be thought about. What made them urgent at six in the morning, on a week with no agenda, was not the dock.
Jon Kabat-Zinn, working with patients navigating chronic pain and illness, made a related observation from the clinical side: a mind trained for years to move toward the next task doesn't simply relax once the tasks stop arriving. It searches for the next one, because momentum has become the nervous system's working definition of safety. Stopping doesn't register as rest. It registers, at first, as something closer to exposure — a sudden absence of the forward motion that had been organizing attention, replaced by nothing in particular, which the mind is not well practiced at tolerating.
This isn't a flaw specific to any one person's temperament. It's what happens to attention that has spent a long time being useful for a living, when it's finally given a morning with no use for it at all.
The people I work with across Connecticut — in Litchfield County towns like Kent, Washington, and New Preston, and throughout Fairfield County as well — often describe a version of this that has nothing to do with the particular week. The time off is planned. The calendar is genuinely clear. And still, somewhere in the first morning of it, the same restlessness shows up looking for something to organize. Clearing the schedule turns out to be the easy part. What doesn't necessarily follow from it is knowing what to do once nothing is required.
Mindfulness-based practice doesn't ask a person to force the settling, or to feel foolish for reaching toward the kayak rack instead. It asks what the reaching is actually doing — and whether the dock, this particular week, could wait.
I work with adults throughout Connecticut — including Litchfield County, Fairfield County, and the towns in between — through telehealth sessions. Prospective clients are welcome to reach out at jonathanwalsh@hushmail.com or to request a complimentary 15-minute consultation through this site.
Frequently Asked Questions about Mindfulness-Based Therapy
What is mindfulness-based therapy?
Mindfulness-based therapy draws on practices of present-moment attention to help people notice and change their relationship to difficult or restless thoughts and feelings, rather than trying to eliminate them outright.
What does mindfulness-based therapy help with?
It is well-suited for anxiety, chronic stress, difficulty relaxing, and the particular restlessness that surfaces when a busy life slows down. It tends to appeal to people who notice they don't know what to do with unstructured time.
How is mindfulness-based therapy different from CBT?
CBT works to identify and examine specific thoughts. Mindfulness-based therapy is more concerned with a person's overall relationship to their thoughts and internal experience — learning to notice what's arising without being immediately organized by it.
Who is a good fit for mindfulness-based therapy?
It tends to work well for people who are willing to sit with discomfort rather than immediately act on it, and who are curious what their own mind does when nothing in particular is being asked of it.
Jonathan Walsh, LMHC, LCMHC, LPC is a licensed therapist offering mindfulness-based therapy via telehealth in Connecticut and several other states. He is a member of the New England Center for Existential Therapy and has completed core training at the Institute for Existential-Psychoanalytic Therapy. Learn more about Jonathan.