Have you ever taken a break from life?

Well, being married and a father with a couple jobs, taking off “more than two months” is an impossibility.

That being said, since graduate school, I’ve made a habit of going away twice a year (once in Spring, once in Fall) by myself. It’s really refreshing and needed. I look forward to it quite a bit.

I think it’s important to make time to disconnect from your routines and spend time with yourself.

I get a bonus one this year as my wife and daughter are going away without me this summer for a mother/daughter trip. I’m really glad they can do this but I’m almost more happy for the alone time.

Regularly, through solitude and sleep. I take every chance I have to recharge myself. If I didn’t do that I would be overwhelmed by life. Relaxing, watching movies, listening to music, drifting to my imaginary world… Just something to take my mind off life for a while.

Sometimes “taking a break” is simply making yourself comfortable. If you don’t have a chance for a vacation, you can just enjoy something close to you.

Yes, Back in 2006 I had the means to not work for a year. It was wonderful. Spent all my time just enjoying my new home, relaxing, contemplating and de-fragging from an extended period of personal and work related stress. It was worth every penny spent and not earned.

I then went on to find a new occupation that was a perfect fit.

No breaks from life. Breaks from work and breaks from other people but life you can’t escape from and I wouldn’t want to.

That is a fantasy for me. I have too many obligations to just take off.

Over 20 years I worked as a Purchasing Agent for five different manufacturing companies. Every day, all day, every issue and requirement was “urgent”....“critical”....“hot”, and of course every department’s need always deserved priority over every OTHER department’s need. Meetings were always a lot of unproductive, ineffective arm-waving, enhanced by veiled management threats.

Finally, after being laid-off by two different companies (both of which closed not long thereafter), I was unemployed for 10 months in 1992. My wife made pretty good money at her job, plus I collected unemployment benefits, so the whole thing wasn’t too scary.

Anyway, after so many years of tolerating the “URGENT, URGENT, URGENT” thing, the unemployed me got to sit on the back patio, drinking coffee, and watch the squirrels play…..(psst…..I kind of liked it).

In October of that year, I was able to get a pretty good job in the same field, but for the next 20 years, it was the same faux urgencies and emergencies all over again.

These days I am retired, and in the morning happily drink coffee and watch the squirrels play…..

Life is.
You can’t take break from it unless you kill your self.
And imagining you can take a temporary break from life by killing yourself is the ultimate fallacy.
So you might as well embrace it. Especially in the enlightened West.

I spend lots of time at home when I don’t have to attend to anything important so I’d consider those off moments of the end of the day my “breaks” I’m quite introverted and I tend to spend lots of time alone. I’ve never had a month of just doing nothing, or anything I wanted completely (unfortunately)

You mean, like, died?

Smashed my alarm clock off the wall on monday mornings…just killing time.