Learning to Smell the Damn Roses
I’ve never actually mastered the art of taking break, but I’m definitely trying.
I don’t think in the 24 years I’ve been alive I’ve taken a break.
Like, a real one.
I don’t mean taking a day, or even a weekend, off to watch Netflix. I mean taking time to do nothing. Absolutely nothing.
I write this as I sit in the condominium my family rented for the week at Orange Beach, Alabama, facing the ocean, taking in the warm, salted, summer breeze. And as I sit here, I’m wondering why it took me so long to actually “stop and smell the roses.”
It’s not that I haven’t been on vacations in the past. I have. But, usually I wake up ready to go. I’m either sprinting towards to shoreline and itching to do as much as I can to fill the week because there’s only so much time I have for vacation.
I never understood why my mother told me to calm down or get irritated when I begged and pleaded to go do something.
It wasn’t until this very vacation that I actually learned how to take a break, to learn what it means to just stop. I mean, I slept in past eight in the morning — which rarely ever happens — and didn’t have a mild panic attack that I wasted my day.
