Relax

It is Christmas time and in the Southern Hemisphere, where I live, also time for an end of year summer break.

My work closes offices as of the 15^th of December and happiness is spreading at the office...finally time to relax. I share the odd comments with colleagues about how great it will be to just do nothing. We love and joke and I am really looking forward to it. However, there is this other little voice in my head telling me all the things I can catch up with and keep myself busy with during the break.

I have no doubt that almost everyone is looking forward to get away from the office and be on holiday. But I think specially us ladies, we have the tendency to look forward to our ‘holidays’ because we will then find the time to get busy at the house, to clean, to wash, to shop, to bake, to cook, to tidy up the things we don’t find time for in our daily routines.

So do we actually ever really relax? How often do we take our holiday time to really be on holiday - to just be, read a book, chill with our favourite music, watch a chic-flick?

I know that it is a true relief to get things done that otherwise are constantly on the ‘should-be-done-never-get-around-to-it’ list. 

The question I ask, is the busyness not sometimes an escape of not taking real me-quiet-time? Are we not maybe running away from being just on our own and do nothing?

I think it is partly our society that drills us to always achieve something or do something, to be constantly productive. It results that after a day of just doing nothing, we feel bad, our bad conscious calls out ‘but I didn’t do anything today’ and one tries to maybe at least cook a meal or DO something, to close the day of with an ‘achievement’ of some sort.
I think being constantly busy can also be an avoidance tactic, because we do not know what thoughts might come into our head, when we allow them to. The new smartphones support us nicely in that endeavour because when we really just sit down to ‘do’ nothing, we can still connect with the whole world on Facebook, Twitter etc.

I am not an exception, but I will put in some serious effort to just do nothing at least for a few days during my holidays and I encourage all of you – do the same – you can. You deserve it and owe it to yourself.