Over the decade of writing Improvised Life five days a week, I’ve never planned time off. In the same the organic way that I follow trails of ideas to write about and decide what to publish when, I let myself tell myself when it’s. time. I listen to the signs.
When ideas and energy feel mired, and the daily disciplines of writing and foraging ideas become curiously daunting and bogged down, I know I need rest. I take the kind of time Jennifer Odell wrote about so incisively in her amazing piece,‘how to do nothing‘, excerpted here.
…I believe that having recourse to periods of and spaces for “doing nothing” are even more important, because those are times and places that we think, reflect, heal, and sustain ourselves. It’s a kind of nothing that’s necessary for, at the end of the day, doing something.
… And it can take a break to remember that, a break to do nothing, to listen, to remember what we are and where we are.
Over years, I’ve learned that my creativity depends on rest as much as it does on action. That it’s my job to take care of it and not bow to the incessant pressures of our driven society, something that’s not always so easy to do.
I’ve read the signs. It’s time for me to take a sabbatical. Wander. Dream. Live without deadlines for a while.
I’ll be back in a week. In the meantime…
