The daily grind of work and its endless succession of minor but urgent issues create a fertile ground for stress & burnout. Taking a break, whether a long weekend or a proper holiday, is the perfect opportunity to rest. However, holidays are not necessarily enough to reboot.
This is because we often focus only on one specific aspect of our tiredness, specifically how tired our body is as it struggles to keep up with our daily workload, until the physical symptoms become all too apparent to ignore. On the other hand, we often ignore or neglect warning symptoms of chronic psychological and mental fatigue, which we only notice once they become too obvious to ignore and it’s almost too late to do anything about them.
Refreshing, rebooting or resetting yourself can only be achieved through systematic and daily approach, not just over the weekend or through the holidays. Caught in grinding gears of daily responsibilities, we promise ourselves to address the issue at the next holiday, but then stress over the holidays as we struggle to ensure these go without a hitch and we make the most of them, or focus on the problems which await us when get back to work. It is essential to understand that rebooting yourself requires neither long breaks nor holiday. Resetting yourself requires an almost daily disciplined effort embodied by the quality of our psychological and mental life on a daily basis.
There are many daily opportunities to shed stress and (re)energise ourselves. Nature itself offers many ways of doing so. The most obvious yet most overlooked is the sky! Permanent, everpresent, the sky is fascinating. By day, evening or night, overcast, grey, or brilliantly clear, the sky always offers food for thought, contemplation and exploration. How often do we cast a meaningful gaze to explore the sky and its full complexity, comprehensiveness & unpredictability while letting our imagination run free? I am unfortunately confident the answer is seldom to rarely.
Even if you are not trained in meditation, simply taking the time to observe the wonders of nature with an open mind will lead you to rediscover the charms of wishes rather than restricting yourself to the tyranny of needs. Too rarely do we enjoy what nature offers on a daily basis to (re)awaken the dormant energy within us, which we could harness to explore our possible outcomes. Too rarely, also, do we explore what our senses tell us and how they interpret the world beyond ourselves. Maintaining a keen awareness of ourselves and our environment through the contemplation of nature is a rich source of inspiration and motivation which allows for constant rebooting.
By Farid Yandouz