For the past week and a half, I have been curling up on the right side of my couch, knee deep in Harry Potter books.

This is not my second, fourth, or even sixth time rereading them. It’s probably somewhere in the teens.

This is what I do. My mom used to say “Maureen, you go, go, go, and then you crash hard”, and whenever I find myself holed up for hours at a time, I know I’m crashing.

Maybe it’s because of the constant activity that seems to flurry around every week, as I sit back and groaningly say “Maybe in April we’ll be less busy….maybe….May….”. Or maybe it’s the simple fact that what goes up must come down.

Whatever it is, I always find that when I am in desperate need of a recharge, I go back to the familiar, the loved- the old things.

For me, it’s dog-eared Harry Potter books, and “Friends” and “New Girl” reruns. It’s toast with butter and Earl Gray tea and flipping through an old scrapbook or two.

The old things to me are the ways that, for this moment, hour, or day, I am not trying to become a new, better, healthier, more interesting me. I’m just filling up my cup with the simple comforts that needn’t be appreciated by anyone but myself.

I’ve come to realize that loving repetition is ingrained in us from the very beginning. I see it in the bedtime songs my mother sang gently to me, that I now whisper to my sweet toddler fighting sleep. I see it in the ways that he hands me the same story over and over with the most abounding delight. I see it in the little jokes we do every day, and the way that yelling “boo” every time I pull a shirt over his head is sure to bring a scream of laughter.

Loving the old and familiar is as natural as the incidental busyness of every day. We, who are bursting from the thrills of the new, the adventurous, and the boisterous learning of every day, can fall back and look to what we have always loved.

Having days full of nothing but the things that bring quiet to my soul are as essential to me as the days that I fight my way to new heights. They ground me and remind me that beneath all of the uncertainty that comes with each day, I can fall back on what I have, and always will, love.

-Mo