First, we set the scene. It’s the late afternoon, and you’ve just arrived home from a really tough day at work. Maybe Tom wouldn’t get off your back about that file. Perhaps you had a customer who refused to be happy, no matter what kind of concessions you made. Or it may have been that you drove forty minutes to meet a client, and then she didn’t show up, and then the unthinkable happens, you swerve to miss a deer and crash your car and have to call 24 hr accident recovery Toledo Ohio to save the day.

We’ve all been here. We’ve all had terrible days at work during which we have seriously considered developing some sort of substance abuse problem in an attempt to deal with our seemingly pointlessly painful lives. But then, right before you turn to a debilitating amount of alcohol, you remember: you have a bathtub. You kick off your shoes as soon as you walk in the door, and drop everything where you stand. It’s probably been raining all day (because that’s the kind of day you’ve had), so everything is likely sitting in a puddle created by the water on your shoes, but you don’t care. None of that matters now. You are going to have a bath.

So you head into the bathroom and start running the water. A little too hot, so that the time you get in, it will still be steaming, and not some luke warm nonsense. While it’s running, you grab some candles. Gently scented, if you have them. Maybe rose, maybe vanilla. You set the candles strategically around the bathroom, and light them. You scroll through the music on your phone and pick the most relaxing album.

You grab a glass from the kitchen and stick your phone in it, life-hacking yourself out of the lack of any sort of speaker system that has the ability to be hooked up to anything made after 1995. Maybe you grab a book and put it beside the tub, just in case. Lastly (and most importantly) you pour yourself a glass of wine, and set it on the edge of the tub. You turn off the lights. The mood is set.

You toss off your clothes (you’ll deal with them later, probably around the same time that you deal with the mess at the front door), and get ready to sink into the bath. But wait! You forgot about the bath bomb you have in the cupboard under the sink. The bath gods have smiled upon you this day. In you drop the bath bomb, and it fizzles and releases a deliciously calming aroma. Finally, you sink into the tub.

Sweet bliss. Nothing else matters. This is your space, and no one, not file-obsessed Tom, not the customer sent from Hades, and not Mrs. Inconsiderate No-Show, will ruin this for you. You close your eyes and let the water splish, splash, splish, splash, gently in the tub, between your fingers, around your hair. Your phone is on airplane mode, your wine is close at hand, and your bath bomb is bubbling. In a half hour, life will call. You will have to get out of the tub, dry off, and return to the world. But that’s not for another half hour. Until then, the world can wait.