About "remembering to breathe"
So about that whole "remember to take a breath and relax" message from last time...
For the few of you that read this email, you probably noticed it’s been nearly two months since my last one. Funny enough, in my last message I stressed the importance of remembering to breathe and take a break.
Well, far be it from me to not live my own advice. I haven’t worked on Daddhism for nearly two months. Woof!
(On that note, I’d like to reiterate: don’t forget to breathe and cut yourself some slack.)
For the past two months I’ve been living. It’s been weird. I wake up, hang out with my family, make coffee, and ease into the day. Then, I work, take breaks to make coffee and hang out with my family, and get back to work until I’m finished. And at night, where I once worked on Daddhism every evening or tackled some other project, I’ve been doing, well, whatever I want.
And it’s been fantastic.
Life in the modern age is strange. Our lives are intertwined with technology, which is often inseparable from our work. The end result is an amalgamation of work, life, the urge for constant growth and progress, the stressors of work creeping into areas where only life should exist, life creeping into moments of thought reserved for work, and a whole lot of confusion.
Most of my life I’ve felt some kind of pressure. And I’d imagine you have too, no matter who you are or what it is you do. But, with our modern lives being so modernly weird, it’s easy to feel even more pressure. After all, where does work end and life begin, especially for those of us working remotely?
It doesn’t help that I often pressure myself. When I’m not pressuring myself to be a better parent and husband, I’m pressuring myself to be a better employee at my job, and also to do better by my own website and newsletter. But like an unattended pressure cooker loaded with chicken and vegetables, all that pressure will lead only to a mess.
So, I took it upon myself to ensure that blend of chicken and veggies didn’t wind up all over the kitchen. (My wife would kill me.) And I took two months off. I didn’t set out to take two months off, but here I am, two months later and perfectly cooked. (Or would it be rested? Do you rest a pressure cooked chicken?)
All of this is to say—take a load off. You’re under enough pressure as it is. You have kids or work or school or illnesses or some combination of them all. Don’t add to the pressure already placed upon you by this wild world. Do what you can to subtract, and use that freed up headspace to do something beautiful.
Stay relaxed, Daddhists.