Take time off
Who cares if it is your Holiday?
Why is it hard?
I’ve written a good deal about the challenge of relaxing. Selfish as one can be in times of challenge, I neglected to do THE MOST important thing and ask: How is it for you?
What is your knee jerk to time off?
Do you sound a “Thank GOD” or resound with an “OK” that hides an “oh, no!” somewhere behind it?
Is there a mixology of the two?
Or - and here is a fun one -does the practice sound fantastic and become paralyzing a few days in?
Where do I fall? Well, all apply...depending.
This year I am at a crossroads at every byway and so time off comes laced with fear and welcomed with the relief of relaxation dehydration, as well as a light topping of healthy avoidance of just those things I am breaking from.
Picking up on last week's theme of Joy and thinking in investment towards what brings us pleasure as evolving towards, just that, evolution and growth. Growth gathers responsibility as fast as it does wisdom, and both are heavy bags to carry. This can lead to feeling heavier with fatigue and the various types of obligations and learnings we collect.
Always in extremes - my habit is to run into the fray and do all the do and stop stopping, take a break from taking breaks; laughing at burn out all the way through finish lines and into more tasks and obligations … and such, and whatnot, and so forth.
Fortunately, we age. And so I am. And I am wondering if that is why I am less inclined to follow the above recipe and taste the opposite. What is that flavor? Avoidance. White wall. Check out. Ostrich-acting (though I don’t think they actually do that).
OK, and is that bad? Is either route the wrong one?
No.
Is any coping approach - and I mean ANY - ill? Well no, on its face they are simply tools. What could be either binarily good or bad is totally in the hands of the person practicing said mechanism.
For me - as the test subject on hand - I’ll say that there are times when I have gotten a good deal out of going HAM. I LOVE that person - the winner, the doer, the goer, the person who sleeps little and impacts a lot. She is me. Just as much as this bum here is, too.
That is right - you read as such. This do-nothing, video streaming one who you may find shuffling in slippers in the late morning about the kitchen in her dirty sweats and too big slippers. The one doing the bare minimum to keep the house from falling down and the pets from starving to earn herself internal permission to go back up to her hovel and read and read and nap and nap. What binds me up is they don’t know each other, these two. They are strangers and enemies and envy each other and need, need, need each other to exist.
I am curious - do either of these versions of you live in you? Is there an infant they beget between them? Have you raised it? Have you held it? Have you found the merging of these better halves of you?
Look, me neither. Well a bit.
Stepping out to go back in: this month we found ourselves in a certain situation where a few of our non-mammalian pets gave birth - or rather hatched - a brood. Now comes the responsibility of seeing how this goes. Loving the parents (not that we can tell these particular parents apart per se’) and caring for these wee little things we barely know how to be with, least nurture. But we are trying because biology denotes that beings come from the blending of parties.
Returning to the linear discussion, it is OK if you lose a few. It is ok if you hide or push or fall off, dive in, whatever. The capacity to do either means sustained something can and does exist. Oh, and even that very word “sustain” is not a set thing, either. Consistency is a place arrived from the skewing and settling and re-swaying between. Point: keep doing whatever. WHATEVER.
This Holiday Season - work on the days when others play or take the entire thing off. Play it day by day and see how it goes - or moreover don’t even choose, because choosing a way to manage an emotion, or conversely - not, is something that each of us might resolve to knock off!
Happy all the things, y’all!
