Rituals for a fresh start every Friday

In which our heroine resets, rests, and recharges

Hi there, sweet friend!

In the tarot, the major arcana represents The Fool’s Journey. In my deck, The Fool, the first card we encounter, features a girl in a floral dress with icy blue hair and a flower crown. The sun shines down on her, she has music playing in her ears, and she is about to careen over the edge of a cliff. We need not fear for her. Like Alice down the rabbit hole, she’s about to embark on something completely new, a fresh start. Every week, I do my best to embody her spirit.

Dr. Katy Milkman, in her behavioral science research, coined the term “fresh start effect.” It refers to the feeling of momentum that we have any time we experience what feels to us like a clean slate. A new year is usually what comes to mind, but Dr. Milkman suggests that we can actually manufacture and harness that “fresh start” energy anytime we need. For example, every Monday or the first of every month. Here’s how she describes it:

“…In these fresh-start moments, people feel more distant from their past failures. Those failures are the old you, and this is the new you. The fresh-start effect hinges on the idea that we don’t feel as perfect about our past as we’d like. We’re always striving to be better. And when we can wipe out all those failures and look at a clean slate, it makes us feel more capable and drives us forward.”

(If you want a deep dive, you can hear her talk all about it on this podcast!)

I think what’s so beautiful about this is that it’s up to us to create our very own fresh starts. For lots of people, Monday is the fresh start — which makes sense. It’s a new week, a new page in the planner.

For me, the tide changes as soon as I finish up my last piece of work and shut my laptop on Friday afternoon. It feels like a natural energy shift in the week and helps abate the Sunday Scaries.

How do we manufacture that fresh start feeling? For me, it all comes down to ritual. Mine has three core components: reset, rest, and recharge.

quite often, I get around to making the bed around 4pm

In defense of Friday night chores.

If you asked somebody what they love to do on Friday nights and they said “clean my house” you might think they were deeply uncool. Welp. Hello, I am deeply uncool. Years ago, I read an edition of one of my favorite newsletters, Girls’ Night In (now

Downtime

), about the appeal of Friday night chores and it has stuck with me ever since.

I can hardly put into words how positive this practice has been on my weekends. It feels nothing short of serene to wake up on a Saturday morning, make breakfast and coffee in a sparkling clean kitchen, and see a both literal and metaphorical blank slate stretching out ahead of me.

Knowing that I will have the dedicated time on Friday to really reset also helps to take a bit of the pressure off during the week when things feel really hectic. It’s a time I have set aside to handle all the life admin tasks that have been rattling around my brain all week, like taking my Nuuly box to the UPS store or picking up books from the library.

Here’s my reset ritual:

• Step one, pick an audio experience. I either put on a record, a podcast, or an audiobook (right now I’m listening to Jane Eyre) to keep me company while I make my way through the house. This is also a beautiful time to call a friend! I had a lovely 40 minute chat with my sister last Friday while I tidied. This also tends to give a natural time limit for how long I’ll spend on the task. I find it’s rarely more than an hour.

• Clear surfaces that accumulate cups, mail, extraneous books, etc. For us, this is our dining room table and the coffee table by our record player. Once the surface is clear, I usually light a scented candle to get the house smelling fresh.

• Hang up coats and organize shoes. This is an opportunity for me to assess which jackets and shoes aren’t going to be immediately worn again and can be put back in our closets and which should be neatly organized by the front door. (As a side note, I cannot wait until I don’t have to think about jacket storage for a while, but alas, I live in Wisconsin and it snowed here this week.)

• Make the bed. I love the feeling of a made bed, both getting into it at night and the calm I get when I go into my bedroom and don’t see rumpled sheets and blankets on the floor. However, I usually don’t get to it in the morning before I go to work and tend to make it in the afternoon.

• Make the couch. We spend a lot of time on our couch and it also tends to get very rumpled by the end of the week. So I like to take off all the cushions, fold the blankets or drape the “just so,” and put everything neatly back together. It means when I’m finished cleaning I have the coziest space to sit and rest.

• Clean the kitchen. This is my least favorite part, but this is my time to address the multitude of glassware that I’ve cleared from all the surfaces of our home, the breakfast dishes, and the errant tupperware that’s made its way to the kitchen. Not trying to do this right before I go to bed also means I have more energy to get things put away and the counters fully cleaned. We tend not to cook on Friday nights, so this is usually the state it remains in until Saturday morning - what a gift.

• Vacuum. Much to my chagrin, my house is almost entirely carpeted. With my two cats, that means a lot of dust and fur accumulates during the week. Our house is small, just over 1000 sq ft, so I can get everything vacuumed quite quickly.

• Finish the week’s folding. I tend to lose steam at some point in the laundry process and usually have a basket of clothes or cloth napkins and towels left to fold. I take it into the sitting room with a cup of tea, put on whatever my latest YouTube hyperfixation is (right now it’s Lucy Moon and Elena Téa) and get everything finished.

a cozy space to do my crafts

Diving into cozy pursuits.

Thus, we journey into the “rest” section of our evening.

Usually I’m not doing anything too strenuous, although I have been known to start wallpapering or painting something at 6:00 on a Friday evening. Most of the time, I’m pulling out the needlepoint canvas I have been working on for about 100 years at this point and stitching in a few more bunches of flowers while I watch an episode of whichever of my comfort shows I’m currently re-watching.

I love to do reading sprints on Fridays too. I read every day, but not always as much as I want to. I find a one-hour long ambience video on YouTube and read until it ends. In the beginning, I often feel a bit antsy and distracted, but by the end I always feel relaxed — and I usually want to gear up another video and keep reading.

Sometimes I like to take myself out on a little solo date. There’s a cheese shop down the street from my house. (Have I mentioned I live in Wisconsin?) On a warm, sunny evening, I love to walk over with my book, order a glass of wine and settle in on the patio with my personal charcuterie plate.

Whatever the activity looks like, I try to prioritize having time by myself to simply slow down, to sit somewhere cozy and just be for a little while.

welcome to the Lakeside Lounge

Friday nights are for friendship.

This is where I actually transition into a Cool Girl. Around 8:00, after feeding the kitties, I head over to the wine shop and bar where Lucas, my husband, works. He gets off at 9:00, so I usually get a glass of bubbly and chat with him and his co-workers until close. This is the number one way I have made friends as an adult, through the repeat exposure method of showing up every week to chat and hang out.

Now, most weeks we all head out for dinner together after the store closes. Sometimes we go out to our favorite late night restaurant in Madison, sometimes we gather at someone’s house. There’s an open invitation for any of our friends to join. Once we transformed the cottage into what I named “The Lakeside Lounge.” I love ending my week with people that light me up and make me feel recharged.

When friends and family come to visit from out of town, my Friday ritual doesn’t change, it just expands. I think when people come to visit, they want to see what your life is like, what places you go, and who you surround yourself with. I’ve had so many magical nights around various tables dissolving into fits of laughter, drinking perhaps one too many old fashioneds, and appreciating the community I’ve built both near and far.

Okay, I’m dying to know…

Do you have any weekly rituals?
Will you be trying out Friday night chores?
How do you create fresh start energy in your life?

Finally, your cozy inspiration for the week:

In the spirit of slowing down, my recommendation for this week is to get a book of poetry and keep it on your coffee table. Avoid the urge to breeze through it and instead give yourself one or two poems per day. I’ve been doing this with this collection and it feels like a treat each day when I read the poems. I find it helps me to absorb the poetry in a much more intentional and deep way.

Thank you, as ever, for reading Cozy Pursuits with Kylin Anne. If you’d like to support my work, please give this post a heart, leave a comment, or share with a friend. To help keep this newsletter going, you can become a paid subscriber or — if you don’t want to make a monthly commitment — buy me a coffee.