These are trying times. New York State especially has been rocked with horrific news this week, and I had to get away from the media just to ease the awfulness of everything that is happening. Work is getting more and more stressful as far as workload and volume goes, and as I started to feel the weight of it all bear down and slow my ability to simply get usual tasks done. Add in our yard’s daunting spring clean up (which consists of single-handedly cleaning and pruning the gardens, and then filling about 50 lawn bags) and lending whatever support I can to my parents has my plate full – and I only ever want a full plate on Thanksgiving or Christmas. I realized I’m at a breaking point, due in part to the dismal fact that I haven’t had a proper vacation in several years. It wasn’t just COVID – we hadn’t gone on a vacation in the few years before that – and I understood that such a lack of relaxation is finally having an effect on me.
As much as meditation and therapy has helped, there’s just so much anyone can do without periods of recharging and restoration, and the increasingly sporadic and spread-out weekends in Boston only charge bits of my battery. It’s probably time for a new battery entirely.
In the past I might have barreled through such a lull in inspiration, forcing myself to just keep going. I know myself better now, and it’s ok to need a break, and to insist upon one. The world wears all of us down. Now and then we deserve a break.
