Happiness and taking a break

We humans have lost the wisdom of genuinely resting and relaxing. We worry too much. We don’t allow our bodies to heal, and we don’t allow our minds and hearts to heal. ~ Thich Nhat Hahn

Sometimes you just need a break!  We are all busy people; we have jobs, families, friends, pets, groups, bills, housework, hobbies, projects and a myriad of responsibilities.  We get up in the morning and we frantically jump into our days often with no plan other than to try to get through the list of things that have to happen today.  More often than not if your life is like mine, shortly after you get into working on that list something comes to completely derail what little planning you’ve done.  I often joke that my to do list at work is both infinite in duration and only a suggestion.

When people ask me what I do for a living I tell them I’m a fireman because at times it seems that all I do is show up at work and put out fires all day, or at least until quitting time.  You know quitting time right, the moment at work after your normal shift ends where you begin to work on what you were supposed to get accomplished that day.  This isn’t a complaint, just an unfortunate statement of reality for most of us.

The frantic pace of our lives is not only driven by unpleasant things.  Depending on your current state of affairs there is also driving kids around, helping out at school, dating, working on relationships, highly planned vacations and even going to the gym, hiking, biking, or other forms of recreation.

Recently I had been feeling pretty down, the normal set of things that can get at a person.  The little things, being too busy, crap at work, etc…  The somewhat bigger things, a relationship with a really amazing woman had ended, disagreements with friends and the normal family realities.  Then of course the really big thing trying to figure out what all of it means, sometimes that just finds its way to the front of your brain for a time.  Even the good things, my writing has kept me incredibly busy lately, there were photos to organize and even losing over 20 pounds and spending a lot of time at the gym had worn me down.

This in a word is one thing, stress.  Now stress is actually a good thing for us, that little burst of adrenaline that exists as part of the flight or fight response can be very helpful in the jungle, tropical or urban.  It can get your attention in a bad situation and even save your life.  It’s when this reaction is happening frequently without the requisite physical need for action that our bodies start to suffer ill effects from stress.  That is in fact where I seem to have ended up and returning to the very basic Taoist principles I asked myself the necessary questions.  Are you safe?  Are you eating right?  Are you sleeping?

I was safe, I had been eating excessively right, I could be sleeping more and better.  What I eventually came to was that although there were legitimate reasons for me to be feeling down, in the end I just need a break.  Dreams of flying off for the weekend to a beach in Mexico in the sun flooded my thoughts but alas were not going to be reality.  Finally I decided to just stop, so last weekend I did just that I stopped.  From Friday until Sunday I didn’t go to the gym, I didn’t worry about getting any writing done, I didn’t make the normal phone calls I make to people, I ignored my work e-mail for the weekend.  I went out and had a couple of really nice meals, I got a massage, I slept in late and even did a little reading over the weekend and of course I made room for dessert.  It was nice, albeit for only a couple of days, to put away the responsibilities, worries and realities of life.  Now of course none of those things disappeared, Monday found me back in the gym, chocolate and coca-colas had once again been banished from my diet and all of the other things were still staring me in the face.  But I was clearer, rested, better able to make hard decisions and had gotten back some of that emotional cushion we all lose when we’re a little too far over the edge, in essence I was happier.

So remember friends, when you hit that point and you need it, find the way to take it, maybe that means relying heavily on a partner to take a bigger burden, or maybe it means slipping away or hell, maybe it’s just an ice cream sundae on the back porch, but when you need it, increase your happiness, take a break and have a happy day my friends
~ Rev Kane