Maybe your To Do list is a mile long and too deep for you to even stick your toe in the water without drowning. It’s a list that has been growing for months and the more you grasp after whittling it down, the longer it grows. One thing leads to another, you tell yourself, feeling exhausted. Day after day, you move along, pretty satisfied with your life, but never feeling like you are getting it all done.

Maybe the good news is that you will never get it all done. Try as hard as you might, the more you pile on wanting things, the longer the list will grow. So what do you do?

You take the list and give it a vacation. You take a Getaway Day.

Have you done that lately? It is something you can write about. What led up to it? What was going on? Why were you compelled to just chuck it all, the whole list and just take off.

It might have been for an afternoon, or a morning. Maybe you just stayed at home and allowed yourself an entire afternoon to read a good book that’s been sitting on your bedside table for the past three months collecting the dust that you’ve been too busy to wipe away.

I recently had a getaway day. It happened by accident. On Sunday morning, I woke up early and went to the Farmer’s Market. I wandered through the stalls. The day was sunny and fine. There was a musician playing even so early as 8 a.m. I had a cup of hot coffee in my hand. I bought beets and potatoes and chard and beautiful round crunchy Asian pears as well as some of the last of the fat tomatoes.

I walked to my car. I drove away.

But as I went down the drive and onto the street, on my way to church and gardening and house-cleaning catch-up I was struck on impulse and turned right on the freeway instead of going straight.

Forty-five minutes later, I was sitting in a coffee shop with a beautiful pastry and the morning paper, in a small town in the wine country. I glanced through the paper and then had a chance to take a deep breath and look out the window at the leaves turning crinkly brown colors against the gazebo where a band must play on summer afternoons.

It was an escape from the week, an escape from the chores. They could wait for another day. I finished my coffee and pastry and wandered around the town. It was an overcast day, clouds in a shadow, wrapping the town and me in a cocoon. I went to the bookshop and sat in a chair and took the time to read the beginnings of several books before I made my decisions on what to purchase.

I walked some more, went to an art gallery. At lunchtime I found a little café down a side street and it looked like it was populated with locals rather than the well-heeled tourists most common to the town. I went in. They had a smoked duck sandwich on the menu for only $12. I asked the waiter about it. He said they made it themselves right there in the kitchen. I ordered it and I was not disappointed. It was lean and tender and there was a little gruyere cheese melted on the whole wheat toast so that it was just mouth watering.

Very satisfied with my adventure, I felt relaxed and ready to return home.

The list did wait for me. But I was able to cross a whole bunch of things right off of it and read one of my books on the sofa instead.

As you read this, you might be thinking of a time that you took off and went somewhere or did something on impulse. You could write a story about that time.