I’m sitting in the couch across from him and he says, “We should do something productive with our Fridays.” I think of the side jobs we could pick up and wonder if it will interfere with our slow coffee habits.

“Extra work? What do you mean?”

“I don’t think a side job would be a good investment of our time,” he responded. I looked at him, confused and a little irritated. Was I supposed to guess what vague thing he meant by “being productive”?

“We don’t really need extra money,” he explained, “I was thinking more like an adventure day.”

I relaxed, and then smiled, “So something exciting! Could we still maintain our slow mornings with coffee?” I have priorities.

That is how we came to have a shared checklist on our phones with the title Quality Of Life Day condensed into the initialism “QOLD Fridays”. The list full of things we’ve always loved to do and rarely planned. Things we will remember when the Fridays have slid by, and the firsts-of-the-month, and then the anniversaries in their own soft and steady way.

Last week we hiked a trail to a place called Pancake Rocks. We ate lunch in the sunny shelter of a boulder, and scrambled about on the sloped formations that genuinely resembled stacked pancakes. On our way down in the late-afternoon shade, we pulled on our snowshoes despite a particular lack of adeptness, and tromped beside the trail, as gleeful as if we were the first to discover the magic of powdery, snowy mountainsides.

In The Fellowship of the Ring, Gandalf says to Frodo, “‘All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.'”

There are a lot of important things we do with our time, Grant and I. Parenting, working, discipleship, resting. Drinking coffee. I think these QOLD Fridays are wise; a beautiful way of imbuing our time with quality, and slowing down this spinning world for just a second.