“If I reach a milestone that I feel is worthy of time off, then what am I vacationing from?…if I’m going to stay as unbalanced as I am with fitness then I’m going to be just as unbalanced in my time off,” Bishoi Khella.  Khella shares this in the context of taking a week long vacation to Mexico and people asking him how he is going to stay on track with his fitness. His reply was that he is not going to stay on track, he’s going to enjoy his time, not track his food, he will drink, he won’t get up early to workout, and he is going to spend time on the beach.  That is the entire point of vacation—to take a break from the norm and allow the mind and body to recharge by not doing what we normally do.  It’s to see something and do something new.  It’s to feel good trying new things and tasting something different.  We can’t look at the time away from a goal as time wasted or as something that will entirely derail us.  It’s more of a pause.  We only get derailed if we completely stop working.  Otherwise those little pauses are more about routine maintenance than anything.

I work with a team of people who are at different points in their lives.  They are younger than me and they have different life circumstances that allow them different freedoms than I have.  I’m also more established and have different opportunities than they have—I also have a family that relies on me and a 20 year long career that requires care and patience to determine my next step.  Balancing all that is a challenge and they tend to look at the things I’ve listed above as an excuse.  These people have their own challenges, but they solve those problems by never turning off.  I’ve seen that lead directly to burnout—I’ve worked like that for years so I’ve also felt that burnout personally.  There never was a milestone I could reach that allowed me to take a break—I was ALWAYS on.  And then I had to be on when other people were off.  Then I had to be on SO other people could take off.  I have seen the power of a project consume people, the power of a lifestyle take over.  In some cases that’s a good thing because we learn to develop it into something massive.  In other cases we lose ourselves to something that can never yield the return we need and it will always demand more. 

So here is the point: we are all worthy of taking the time we need to recharge.  We are all allowed to take a moment to appreciate where we’ve gotten and what it took to get there.  Taking a break, reaching a point where we acknowledge the need to take some time to ourselves away from all of the craziness we endure on a daily basis doesn’t make us weak and it doesn’t mean we are giving up.  It means we are human and need some time.  Sometimes the only way to stay balanced is to allow ourselves to get a little imbalanced.  Allow the brain to work through the proprioception of our location and establish a new equilibrium so we remember that we aren’t machines.  Take the time to be human in the pursuit of our goals.  We need to make sure that progress is measurable but we don’t need to fixate.  We need to know the point when we have to stop and take a break.  This isn’t a limit, it’s about maintenance as I said earlier.  We give ourselves the time we need to recharge and then we get back at it with new energy, new dedication, and a new perspective.  So get in touch with what we need and honor those things that may require us to take a pause but ultimately help us get back on track.