The break

I love taking breaks. A coffee break or a lunch break when I am working. A break from being active. A break from resting. A break from being online. A mini-getaway after a work week. Or a break from vacationing.

Taking a break means changing the rhythm of whatever it is I have been doing for long.

When I started working on my own, I did not have a family and I lived by myself. I could start working when I got up, go about my day and maybe meet someone for lunch or whatever.

Returning home I was back on my laptop and never really stopped working, at some point I just went to sleep.

It was fine for a while. But to build your life around one activity, that's insanity.

You need beginnings and ends to gain perspective, just like you need the idea of cold in order to understand what hot is. You need to rest to feel the inspiration to move, and you need to move to feel the pleasure of resting.

Even short deliberate breaks during the day boost our ability to focus on our tasks again. Whenever something starts to feel difficult or tiring, I know it is time to take a break and clear my thoughts.

As much as I like staying in, I also work at home a lot, so to amplify the shift from workweek to weekend, I often plan a dinner out for Friday night.

After a nice meal it feels heavenly to return home and the whole weekend feels fuller. It had a clear beginning. By Saturday morning it feels it has been ages since the weekend begun.

That is how our memory works. In retrospect, we recall the engaging moments, the shifts and the moves. The more memorable experiences occurs in a time period, the longer the time feels in our thoughts afterwards.

A dull week can go by and we remember nothing afterwards. You remember what you did last summer and the summer before that, but you do not remember what you did the last week of January. It is like that week never happened.

Take breaks.

While they refresh you, you might also end up experiencing something to remember.