The importance of life transitions can not be underestimated in order to cultivate, optimize and preserve overall health and wellness of mind, body and spirit. In the modern world, humans have become expert multitaskers, which is great for personal and vocational efficiency, but tends to make our lives into a gigantic blur of nonstop activity that offers no breaks in the furious action. Furthermore, people tend to have difficulty focusing their energies and concentration on just one thing, since their brain is so acclimated to being scattered and chaotic in its approach to doing everything at once. We can not even rest and relax without our brains drifting about to distract us from what we truly need at the moment.
Workers and their employers think that being capable of multitasking is ideal. However, is it really possible to do great work when you are doing 12 things at once? How can all the details of a project be performed to complete satisfaction when they are intermixed with the details of potentially hundreds of other seemingly unrelated ideas and tasks? Doing everything at once leads to sloppy results and a sloppy life. Your edges become blurry and you are not defined as an individual.
How can we derive enjoyment from the simple things in life when they are relegated to the background by all the clutter of activity in our minds and bodies? Is it even possible to be satisfied with a life filled with only the most surface, superficial details of the people, places, things and concepts which surround us? How can we even know ourselves and work towards good mindbody health if we can not remove the clutter from our brains and become truly introspective and present?
Vacation becomes work. Holidays become work. Family time becomes work. Even pleasure becomes work. We are intermingling the concepts of our lives so much and so often that psychological associations become confuscated and unclear. We are never sure exactly what we are doing or should be doing at any given moment in our efforts to do everything, feel everything, absorb everything and process everything all at once. It is overwhelming and counterproductive to success in any given objective. Worse yet, it is detrimental to our total good health.
Do not blur your life into one continuous stream of activity. You must disengage from one activity before truly engaging in another. Create transitions between focused periods of intense activity with rest, reward and renewal. Vacations, days off and holidays should be utilized continuously to improve performance and satisfaction in all facets of life and should not simply become a continuation of the blurriness of daily life. When you let go, allow yourself to fall without a safety net into true periods of disconnect from your normal routine. I promise you that the world will go on without you for a few hours or days. Best of all, it will welcome you back when you are ready to return to whatever it is you do…
We must all strive and succeed. Our world is fast-paced and requires coping skills that not everyone possesses organically. However, all people can benefit from taking time to focus more on the task at hand, while learning to minimize the external background noise of life, as well as the internal background noise of our minds. Focus on what you are doing, whatever it is. This includes your health. Make time to do things right. This includes improving your health. Remove distractions from your life and banish factors that are detrimental to your health. Learn to breathe both in and out. You can not just keep proverbially gasping for air day after day while furiously moving in place. You must learn to exhale, take it all in and focus on what is important in order to progress forward. This is the path to good health, increased life satisfaction and true proficiency in all things. When the job is done, take a rest. You deserve it and must claim it as your right.
