Take A Day Off

By Meg Rosen

Pull the plug on your overload

Boy, do you need a vacation! Just a few days of quiet—but hurricane season left Florida resembling a soggy shingle factory, and the green still hasn’t grown back around the time-share in Colorado since the great fire. And you’ve sworn you’ll take another road trip with four rambunctious kids in the backseat when Cancun freezes over!

You’ve really earned it! Multitasking became a way of life during holidays and winter term, but you thought there might be a slacking off after that intensity. Instead, you’ve raised the barre on yourself again, and are rushing from one square of your Daytimer to the next. There are no appointments penciled in saying “Stop,” “Rest,” “Sleep,” “Dream.”

Do you find yourself walking into a room and not remembering why you went there because you were thinking ahead? Worse, have you turned off the freeway or gotten off a bus and not known where you were because your mind had already moved on to the next task or appointment? Do you always have to “be somewhere” when where you are is right here? Are you impatient and short-tempered because no one is quite ‘up to speed’?

Mobile phones go everywhere; wireless networks and batteries go everywhere. Blackberries, Palm Pilots, iPods—noise is everywhere and you are always on call! Superman is revealed since no phone booths or phantom tollbooths exist now that everyone is cellular.

The volume and velocity of information coming to you and demanding your attention is unceasing and—unless you take strong measures—out of control.

Consider that you are already multitasking without planning it. It’s that autonomic nervous system. Like some old Timex watch commercial, your heart keeps on ticking, your lungs keep on bellowing, your digestive and plumbing systems keep on flowing, and like the indomitable Energizer Bunny your brain and nervous systems keep right on flashing little chemo-electrical signals that check up on everything else. Doesn’t that mean that you are already doing enough? Summon up your courage for rebellion. Go ahead, pull the plug. Cut the cord. Take a day off.

Turn off alarms, beepers, and cell phones. Set your voice mail’s alternate greeting to tell callers you are not in on your day, refer them to someone else if possible, or simply say you will return their calls day after tomorrow. Now do the same thing with your email. Just check the box for automatic reply, type one in, and forget it until day after tomorrow. Arrange for someone else to pick up the mail or just leave it in the box as if it were a second Sunday this week. Attach a discrete note to the front door, saying simply that you will return tomorrow.

Invest in earplugs and maybe even leave your contacts in their case. It will take some practice, but plan to do nothing. You won’t be able to on the first try, of course, but try not to decide to remodel the garage or something similar. Remember this is a vacation day, a noise and people fast, a day spa that involves rest and restoration for you—meditation, prayer, a long leisurely bath or sauna. Favorite snacks and fresh flowers or scented candles, that sort of thing. This may last for a half-day before you begin to twitch and your resolve to take a full day off begins to wane.

Try for perspective. Remind yourself that no one is indispensable. That time goes by too quickly in life and you want to make that quality time rather than tight-jawed and breathless time. Read an old book. Remember when children and parents had some privacy from one another because they weren’t subject to instant access. Where did the phrase “Peace and Quiet” go? Messages took weeks to get across country, we thought it was miraculous that they did, and our economy seemed to be healthier than today’s online bills and payments pretend to make us. Remember that ‘stress’ was a word used by engineers to measure the pressure on bridge cables, rather than jargon employed by every second-grader in his ‘post-traumatic stress’ psychodrama.

By day’s end you may feel restored and ready to start tomorrow from a more peaceful stance—or you may feel anxious and antagonistic over missing something or not being missed. In either case, the one-day vacation should do you good and perhaps your family and colleagues too. Coping with the overload of noise and information demands is every modern teacher’s personal challenge, but no one needs to explain the value of pacing and breathing to a dancer who wants to make it all the way to the end of the music. And rest is a good lesson to pass to your students.

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