Sometimes, when I hit a stretch of unscheduled time, I’m at a loss as to what to do. This happened to me during the long holiday weekend, when we came back from skiing.

I can usually come up with some “stay busy” activities, but frankly, I didn’t feel motivated to pay bills, check social media or get an early jump on my email backlog.

You may feel this, too, when you feel like you should do something, but you’re trying to enjoy a mini-vacation. So, I texted my exec. coach.

I told her that I realized that I’m nearly always striving. At work, it is go, go, go. And, I’m even striving during leisure time; during our ski weekend, for example, I tallied how many runs I could do in a day and skied as fast as I could.

And, here’s the rub: if I’m not striving, I at times become anxious.

“I think you should just ‘try to be,'” she said. “Try something new that you can do right now. Make it about doing something and nothing at the same time, but is nurturing.”

So, I decided to take up sketching. I haven’t illustrated anything since 6th grade. I’ve never taken a course. And, I wanted to find an activity that was portable and easy to do. I bought a sketchbook and some colored pencils. And, I did the above illustration, called “River’s Edge.”

I’m not striving to be good at it, and I’m ok if people think my drawings suck. I’m just sketching to sketch. In fact, it felt great to exercise a new part of my brain.

It was really fun to visualize Montana. I loved it out there last summer.