Last weekend I went away for the weekend to Derbyshire and stayed in a lovely little log cabin in the countryside.
We arrived at about 10pm, got out of the car stiff and sleepy but woke up instantly when we opened the door to our cabin and began to explore our home for the next 3 nights.
Don’t get me wrong, it was a tiny cabin, but it had it’s own sauna and jacuzzi in the bathroom. That was the main highlight of the break away. It meant we could spend 3 days doing nothing but relaxing, and we didn’t even have to see anyone else if we didn’t want to.
Why am I telling you this?
Because, believe it or not, by Sunday morning, I was really struggling to relax.
I woke up and found myself feeling compelled to write, or study, or DO SOMETHING.
Not just anything either, I had stuff on my to-do list. None of it was urgent. All of it could wait. Yet I had this feeling of it being wrong to relax.
Why do we feel we are lazy or wrong to allow ourselves some well-deserved down time?
In the end, I put away my laptop and forced myself to forget about work (with the help of a jacuzzi and sauna!). But it wasn’t easy, and it left me wondering why I felt so naughty for allowing myself some time off.
I came to the conclusion that the work I wanted to do (mainly writing blog articles, reading psychology and hypnotherapy books and doing yoga) I didn’t feel I should be classing as ‘work’.
In my head, these things were things I should want to be doing. They weren’t my full-time job, they were my interest; my choice. Yoga makes me feel fantastic but I had made it in to a chore by telling myself I had to do it because I should want to do it.
The thing is, you can love doing something, have a passion for it and have a drive to succeed in an area related to it, but that doesn’t mean you have to want to do it all the time.
Your body needs time to rest, and will feel all the better for it.
We all need to realise that we can’t eat, breathe and sleep our passion every second of every day. We need to give ourselves some down-time to switch off, take a step back and gain some perspective.
If I’d have sat in that cabin and forced myself to write, I wouldn’t have written well. I would have written because I’d told myself I had to write.
I enjoy writing because it’s not a chore – that only works if I only write when I feel inspired to do so.
What are you making in to a chore in your life? Is there something you used to love but somehow you managed to make doing it an obligation or a chore and now somehow it’s lost it’s charm?
Give yourself a break – take some time off from it and allow yourself to find the magic again. If it doesn’t come, then maybe it’s time to find some new magic!