Do you have to be forced to take a break?

Last night the power went off in my neighborhood for hours. I can’t even begin to tell you how much work I had to do. :)

I smile because without this power failure, I would not have taken a break. No power means no studio gear, no stereo and no internet. It was too dark to work on crafts or dolls and reading without light strains my eyes so I sat in the dark for a good long while and rested. The really beautiful thing about no electricity in the city is you are reminded how dark darkness is and how quiet silence can be. Lovely…

I shone a flashlight on the ceiling and made animal shadows from my hands. That was fun and then I settled into bed early and watched several episodes of Fringe from a portable DVD player until I fell asleep. It felt like a mini vacation. My vacations usually have a ton of people around because I would fly back to Canada to hang out.

Life is set up to rest at the end of it. I don’t even mean death, I mean retirement. You are supposed to continuously look forward to it. But what if we don’t survive that long? How can we stop ourselves from looking forward and start looking at right now? If we keep waiting for life to slow down, we will be perpetually waiting.

Last night, if someone told me to stop working there is absolutely no way I could have. But since it was forced and I feel so refreshed this morning, I’ve decided that I am going to force breaks from now on. I will call it Imaginary Power Outages and make it spontaneous. Know why? It felt so unbelievably good!

Maybe we should each hire someone to spontaneously shut off the main breaker. We wouldn’t see it coming, they wouldn’t tell us when it’s coming. Who cares if it’s inconvenient?

Are you only going to stop your craziness if the power goes down or can you force your own breaks?

Enjoy your day!

Karen :)

“Sometimes the best lighting of all is a power failure.” ~Doug Coupland