a nest in time
...
When I speak of nest in time, I mean any frequently repeated experience whose unique dynamics, intensity of involvement and regular length wall it off from other experiences and so establish a discrete psychological environment. While we habitually seek out nests in space, areas for privacy or intimacy or repose, we are relative novices in establishing these temporal havens, and slow in realizing that free space is useless without uncluttered time. Indeed, a nest of time need not require a special place at all: its only two requirements are that it concern some desirable activity and that it be, barring emergencies, inviolable. A writer sits down to work. It is nine in the morning, and the next four hours are free, just as they have been the day before and will be the day after, by his express decision and unequivocal need.
He looks down those four hours as down a clear view of unencumbered space; more broadly, the regular work periods of the future open up like a long bright hallway of work in freedom. He has no need to fear a wasted hour, an unproductive day, and conversely he has no time-related excuse for sloth or failure. Two lovers meet each evening from five until seven. Their activities vary but their intimacy does not. Whatever else they do during the day is redeemed by this period. A man goes jogging regularly, through the countryside or a park, for forty minutes. The stress of running is sufficient to make it the only thing he thinks of. Yet immediately beneath his awareness of the present, in the familiar landmarks and the familiar stresses, is the sense that he has done this before and will do this again, that he characteristically wills to do it, that in doing it he enters and enlarges a part of himself which is unavailable to him at other times. Such periods unify us, concentrating our energy, judgment and emotion upon a single point. Conversely, they relieve us from all other considerations and so give us profound refreshment. They give us, if temporarily, ourselves. They are true acts of freedom, compared with which our normal miscellaneous diversions and indulgences of impulse are like the flutterings of moths.
— Robert Grudin, Time and the Art of Living