For the last week, I’ve been on a “vacation.”
I put that in quotes because the longer I run my own business, and the more time that passes where I am my own boss (most of the time), I find the old adage to be true. When you run your own business, there never really is a day off from professional pursuits.
I think the days of being totally unplugged on vacation and separated from my daily life at home are way behind me.
Here’s the deal. My personality tends to fall into extremes. If I love something, I love it with gusto, until I’m pretty much living it. I can easily become a workaholic without even thinking about it. It’s like an internal voice inside my head pushes me to go, go, go all of the time, until before I know it, I burn out. In the past, this hasn’t had pretty results. I haven’t handled the “work/life balance” very well. Some years, I didn’t take vacations at all, and other times, I would take a vacation only to find myself working the entire time I was supposed to be on a break.
However, I’m getting lucky with this writing gig of mine.
The fact is, writing doesn’t feel like work. It just doesn’t. Not only do I love it, and not only does it define a huge part of my true self, but never, not once in this whole journey, has it ever felt like work. It has felt like the opposite: fun. I find myself waking up and turning out the computer, ready to write, edit, connect with readers, and create without any prompts from anyone. It just happens, and it happens over and over and over again.
This creates an interesting situation in my life. When you’re doing something you love, and it doesn’t feel like work, you don’t need a vacation, right?
Wrong.
You need one more than ever. You need one because sometimes breaking away can motivate your resolve. You need one because there is more to live than professional achievements. At least, that’s what the experts keep telling me.
And so, for the last few days in Florida, I’ve been on vacation.
Before I left Cincinnati, I scheduled most of my posts on social media, scheduled some blog posts, and put aside my work in progress. I vowed I wouldn’t look at the characters or the story line of my latest project for five days, until the last two days of my time at the condo. I didn’t know if I could do it, but I vowed that I would force it, no matter what.
Know what I found when I turned on my computer and opened my latest document back up yesterday afternoon? Magic. The words flew off the page. I wrote faster than I have in weeks. The story had new life, and so did my resolve to finish it. For the first time since I started that project, I can see the story clearly, and a path to its completion.
Maybe vacations do work, after all.
Sara Celi 