The bliss of the long Friday bath
A small letter on the practice of taking an extended bath on Friday evenings — and on what the right kind of preparation can do for the small ritual of closing the week.
Dear reader,
Friday evening. The week is over. The phone has been put in a drawer. The kitchen has been tidied. The bath has been running for about three minutes and is, now, almost full. I will, in a moment, get into it and not get out for at least an hour. This is one of the small things I do most reliably, every week, and I am writing about it today because I have, recently, been refining what I bring to the bath, and what I bring has made the bath better.
What goes into the bath
Three tablespoons of Epsom salts, dissolved as the water runs. The magnesium is genuinely useful, and the salts dissolve fully if added at the start. Two drops of lavender essential oil added once the bath has filled. Three or four drops of a body oil I have written about elsewhere — added at the last minute, swirled gently with the hand, so the oil floats and slowly coats the skin as the body sinks in.
A single small candle on the small ledge by the bath. The bathroom light is off. The hallway light is off. The only illumination is the candle, which provides, in the small bathroom, exactly the right amount of light to see by without disturbing the slow descent into the warm water.
A small ceramic mug of warm chamomile tea on the same small ledge, within arm's reach. A small folded towel on the floor next to the bath, in case the water cools and I want to get out.
That is the entire setup. The whole preparation takes about ten minutes, including the three minutes for the bath to fill. The hour that follows is one of the small reliable pleasures of the week.
What the long bath does
Slowly closes the week. The first ten minutes is mostly the body settling into the warm water and the small accumulated tensions of the working week starting to drain. The middle thirty minutes is when the slow restoration actually happens — the breath drops to a depth it has not reached in days, the shoulders soften, the small muscles around the spine let go of their grip. The last twenty minutes is the small after-state, in which the body is in a kind of warm receptive quiet that no other practice quite produces.
By the time I get out of the bath, the week is, in some specific way, structurally over. The weekend begins from a clean baseline. The body that walks into the bedroom to get ready for sleep is a different body than the one that walked into the bathroom an hour earlier, and the small Friday ritual has, in some way, become the most important structural moment of the entire week.
Until next Friday,
M.