“Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.” – Anne Lamott
An Aha! moment it was. I’m accustomed to going through the week with a set of deliverables and tasks in a matrix where I’m the common piece. When the weekend approaches and I tend to not have certain scores made it gets to me and I feel like there’s just much more to do. On this occasion, I was to meet a friend and partner to deliberate on certain aspects of our work at the clinic for patients with Non Communicable Diseases (NCDs). I have this commitment to the work and everything about what I do feeds into a stream and any lapse in the chain seems to impede progress which isn’t something I appreciate that much. For that matter, we started deliberating on the options we had and being official work days were already packed, we had to play around with the weekend.
Being I had earlier lined up a couple of activities to attend to on Saturday, it left me with Sunday for which I was open to doing anything and everything provided in aligns with what I’m committed to. This is when I brought up the option. To my amazement, he was like that’s my day for my family. I’ve got to take time to be with my children. That was something especially for a maniac who takes not much downtime even though I try to. Such moments are in some way a downtime that happens to be important and taking such moments to connect with family and loved ones is on another level. I celebrate such people and commit to work towards that in due course.
Based on the above narration, I’ve come to realize that even though there is so much going around on taking downtime or rather unplugging and having a break, not often does it happen. This is partly because of our general focus on what’s to come next which rarely comes from the downtime. For that matter we never do, or rather I never get around to it with ease even though I know I need it. I’ve had this persistent headache that’s telling me I need to slow down and I’m gonna take heed now. I suggest you do too. Don’t push yourself to a point of no return. Nothing comes back from there and that’s why it’s called a point of no return. Have a fantastic weekend ahead.
“Offline is the new luxury.”