Signs of Life

I spent a week on the North Shore in April. (Photo credit: Rambling Traveler; licensed under the Creative Commons)

Blogging is blogging because it’s casual, relevant and frequent. As in, it happens regularly. As in, twice a week. Or once a week. Or several times a day.

Recently I’ve fallen short in the frequency department. Here’s how I fell off the wagon: a holiday weekend (July 4th) hit, followed by a day or two of vacation, followed by a busy time in the production schedule when I was back at work, followed up by a dismaying few days of underinspiration and general lack of interesting things to say (one could argue that this period is not yet over… ahem).

So today, with a little more time in my schedule, my natural instinct was to start feeling guilty about my lapse. But lately I’ve been working to fight my natural propensity for guilt, so I began to look for a positive perspective on my long stretch of silence — and I found it in the importance of vacations.

Now, granted, I was not vacating the office the whole time I was asleep in the blogosphere. But the holiday weekend did kick off my extended stretch, and summer is one of the classic vacation times. So what better time to think about the necessity of vacations.

In March, we ran a story on the critical importance of vacations — and how our culture doesn’t recognize or support the regular taking of them (read No-Vacation Nation here). In short, the story recounted how vacations are necessary not just for health and happiness, but also for success and productivity. Yet we Americans take far too few of them.

Another seminal point in the story is that when many of us DO take vacation, we take some work — maybe a laptop or our blackberry — with us. We don’t ever truly vacate from our duties and responsibilities.

We’re always connected — dizzyingly so — with our work, our to-do lists, our daily tasks, our online audience, be it comprised of one reader (Hi, Aunt!) or 100,000. We rarely, if ever, fully step out of our daily routines.

Yes, it’s in our cultural DNA to work round the clock — our country was built on the idea of hard work and ritual sacrifice. But it’s in the best interest of our health to take a break now and then. And not just by turning off the phone for an evening. We need to really disconnect, get away, take more than a long weekend. These longer breaks give us the opportunity both to reconnect with our true selves (who we are as human beings as opposed to human doings) as well as with family, health, dreams, goals, sleep, leisure, and joy.

I stumbled across a recent New York Times article on the exhaustion (sometimes deadly) of round the clock blogging — and, indeed, it would seem that, as the author Matt Richtel suggests, 24/7 blogging and continual connectivity is the 21st Century sweatshop. The digital dawn has made our lives easier in many respects, but it also asks us to pay for that ease with our time and near constant attention.

And while I’m not in any way comparing myself to those fevered 24/7 bloggers — hardly! — I think with the completion of this post I’ll take a mini-vacation break for tea and a bowl of raspberries in whole milk. And you, having just read this post, should turn off the computer and do the same.

Laine’s garden in happier [read: warmer] times.

I’ve been meaning to put up a blog post for more than a week now, but I’ve been so busy working on an EL story on time and how we need more of it that I haven’t had the time. (There’s a great story (not mine) on making time for vacations in the current issue of EL.)

Beyond the inherent irony here, how depressing is this? It’s sad to preach something I can’t manage to practice. More than that, even, my time crunch also makes me want to utter (in complete earnest) one of the most cliched phrases on earth: “I wish there were more hours in the day!” How did I become the cliché I preach against?

I guess the better question is: how could I have avoided it? Time shortages are a stalwart of today’s culture. It’s almost a badge of pride to continually be working. Even we who preach the importance of “making time” routinely ignore the message. “Yes, yes,” we say. “Of course we should all take vacations! And put the computer away at 5:30 pm and focus exclusively on family, or leisure, or creative pursuits! Even I’m going to do it, too…. right after I finish writing this article on why making time for our lives is important. Don’t wait up…”

To break this mold — at least for right now on this Thursday afternoon at 1:46pm — here’s a list (rather than lengthy posts) of all are the interesting things I’ve been meaning to blog about if only I had the time. Probably works out better for you, too. Who has time to read all this stuff anyway?

1. If you are sick, for goodness sake, stay home. A recent New York Times story reports on the benefits to companies, employees, and (somewhat counterintuitively) our own productivity, when we actually stay home from work when we’re sick. Well, sure, you’re thinking, isn’t that what people already do? Perhaps some of us, but not everyone. In fact, recent studies have shown an increased trend in “presenteeism,” or the insistence on showing up at work or other events no matter the degree of one’s illness. (On a sidenote that will further reveal how disconnected I am from what I write about: I am in the office today and I’m sick. What kind of crackpot am I? To my credit (if I get any at this point), I was out sick the last two days and felt better this morning, came in and then felt worse all over again. Co-workers, I’m sorry. I’m going back home when I finish this post.)

2. Good food is thrilling. I interviewed celebrity chef Nathan Lyon this week. I’ve never met someone more excited about fresh, local food. Lyon is like a human mash note to good eating. (I had a work meeting directly following our interview. While I was in the meeting taking notes on my laptop, he sent me an email with a picture of the honey lemon tea soufflés he whipped up right after we got off the phone.) A side note: he offers some really useful tips and techniques on cooking basics on the website for his Discovery Health TV show A Lyon in the Kitchen.

3. I’m going to join a CSA this year. I’m giddy at the prospect of all that fresh produce showing up at my doorstep once a week. While I was looking for a CSA in my area (find one in any area in the country through Local Harvest), I discovered that there are fresh flower CSAs, too. Fresh, organic flowers from local growers once a week at my door? Too decadent to be true! To beautiful to ignore! I have this gut feeling that I should save my money for my poor dog’s physical therapy (I have a tripod). But wouldn’t the boost to my spirits from fresh weekly flowers be so powerful that it’s worth it? These flowers look so amazing I think they would even boost the dog’s spirits.

4. February in Minnesota is brutal. Long slog of winter be gone! The picture up top is of my humble garden in the peak of summer. I have it as wallpaper on my computer during February. Only one day to go ’til March….

4b. Okay, so, for technical reasons that I don’t understand, I can’t get the picture of my garden to post. But in the spirit of going home before I get my coworkers sick (see item #1, above), I’ve decided to figure out how to post it tomorrow.