Starting with Ease ... or Something Like That

After two weeks of alternately running around and doing all of the holiday activities and then chilling hard in a succession of post-holiday Pajama Days, the first day back to school for my daughter and the first day back at work for me felt jarring. This year, I decided to take the holiday break very seriously and even went so far as to turn off all of the notifications on my phone and shut down my email boxes for two full weeks. It was glorious and much-needed—a couple weeks untethered, letting my family’s little world get very small, quiet, and stress-free.

Before my daughter got up this morning, I made a point of waking up early for some quiet time to center and be quiet before what I knew would be a chaotic day began. I wrote down my intention for the day, which was, ahem, and I quote: To ease back into real life after break without getting swept up in the rush, stress, and mania of it all.

Uh huh. I’m guessing you can imagine how that went …

Flash forward about an hour and a half: we’re running late for school and about to fly out of the house when my daughter realizes she has to use the bathroom—urgently. As she does this, my phone rings, and it’s a return call I’d been waiting to receive and couldn’t miss. As I’m on that call and my daughter is calling for me, the doorbell rings and the heating guys are here. While I’m walking them to the thermostat that needs replacing (as my daughter is calling me and this phone conversation is still going on), another contractor texts to let me know he’s arrived to fix a leak in the roof.

It was all … not how I imagined it. I felt completely blown away and defeated before the day had even started, and incredibly daunted by the hundreds of emails in my inboxes and the pile-up of meetings that I knew awaited me starting mid-morning.

So I did something I don’t always (okay, don’t often) do when life feels like it’s running away at its own breakneck velocity, dragging me along behind it. I stopped. I made some hot coffee and took it out to the contractors, then chatted and joked with them for a bit. I went back inside and made myself breakfast and sat down to eat it without going through emails simutaneously. I decided to go for a walk as I talked to a client on my first meeting.

And then, as I crashed into my next meeting—which we were all late and frenzied for due to a series of contractor- and tech-related incidents—my clients and I took a couple of minutes to vent and then laugh about how crazy it all was. And, with that out of the way we dropped into The Zone and collectively went into a creative bubble where it felt as if the next ninety minutes somehow evaporated into nowhere. I came out of that meeting reluctantly, and with the wonderful reminder that while the time I took off during the holiday was necessary and good and exactly what I needed (what we all need more of), I also love what I do. And it felt good to be back at it, chaotic though the re-entry was.

I hope that I take this with me into the new year—this reminder that we can’t always control the chaos, but we can control how we react to it. And also that when things speed up, it’s usually a good time to stop—even if it’s only for a moment.