Road-trips & Guilt-trips

I was up on the West Coast of Ireland for the week in a campervan with some friends. It was great craic and we saw parts of the country I would never have seen otherwise had we not been under an international travel ban.

I spent the week away from the keyboard. I spent very little time on my phone. I only jotted a handful of notes in some of my notebooks. I didn’t write much for a week and during the first few days I felt guilty about it because in my head it felt like I wasn’t being productive. The guilt took away from the moments I found myself because although I was enjoying myself, I felt on some level that I should have been being more productive with my time.

Of course, this line of thought makes little sense if you take the time to think about it properly. What is the point in chasing dreams, success, achievements if you are unable to enjoy your time away from those endeavours? There doesn’t seem to be any sense to that. If you can’t enjoy your down time you’re voluntarily allowing yourself to be Sisyphus; constantly working towards your goal just for the goalposts to move once you attain the goal.

To be guilty in your down time is in itself unproductive too. If you’re purposely taking time away from working, yet feel guilty for doing it, then you are wasting this time. You’re wasting it because you are neither enjoying your time-off nor are you using it for the purposes of your work. Instead you are caught in between both, feeling miserable for not being productive, and not being able to enjoy yourself because you keep feeling bad about not doing some work. The most productive way to use days off is to actually allow them to be days off rather than spending these days thinking about how little work you’re doing.

More specifically to my life, I felt bad for not writing. It felt like I was stagnating during those first couple of days. But then I took a step back and realised that I was feeling bad for living my own life. To some degree, in the irrational part of my brain, I wanted to make up the lives of other people in my stories more than I wanted to experience my own life. That’s weird enough.

Once I came around to this realisation I stopped thinking about how little writing I was doing and began to fully enjoy my days off and I had a great week, lads. I think a lot oof us fall victim to this kind of thinking though and so I thought it was important to highlight. Yes, we all want to continue to progress and move forward with our goals but we shouldn’t guilt ourselves every second we’re not being “productive” (Whatever that means).

Instead, we should understand that rest days are part of the process. We should understand that our best work or ideas may come to us when we’re completely separated from our passions. You might find yourself solving a problem that’s been nagging you for months while you’re stood on the top of a mountain in Mayo, and sure isn’t that fucking grand as well?

The take away for me this week is to make more effort to reduce the pressure I put on myself and to enjoy the moments as they come instead of in the rear-view. Somehow I know that mind-set is more conducive to productivity anyway, so that works out nicely.

Drink water,