This one is a break from previously posted prompts… One for the holidays!  Enjoy.

Why is it that every time we find something that we want to do, there’s something else that we have to do first? Why is that? You have to eat your broccoli before you can enjoy your desert. Ugh. What do you feel you need to get done before you can enjoy the holiday(s)?

I guess it depends on how you were raised. Puritan/Protestant work ethic dictates that Life is Work and anything that distracts from that is Sin. Catholicism would say you have to work all week to earn that small reward, that you’ll overdue it and have to ask for forgiveness later. All I know is that having worked around the clock since August 8th until December 16, that it takes days to adjust to not waking up at 5:30, enduring the constant motion and emotions of hundreds of pre-teens, many expending their “limitless” energy to disrupt the educational process, for seven hours each and every day. 

I’ve always been pretty bad at “relaxing” and disengaging from the productivity treadmill I usually live in. We’re a week into the current Winter Break and the only real difference is that I don’t drive into work each day. I’m still burdened with the countless projects that I want to accomplish during the break. I am my own worst enemy. 

In the six years that I worked at Full Sail University in Florida, I only took “time off” to go to conventions (all education/tech related)… except for one road trip that I took with a girlfriend, just before I was diagnosed with my autoimmune illness (CIDP). I’m not very good at this. This is not a complaint as much as an observation that I need to become much better at working with a “less structured” schedule. 

When I was laid off from my 15-year job with the phone company in 1994 I floundered for months before getting a temporary teaching job. I was getting full wages for six-months and I not could wrap my head around the possibility of traveling or some other adventure because I had become unhinged from a daily work commitment and that got in the way of taking advantage of this opportunity. Ugh.

How do you deal with time off? Can you quickly disengage? What’s your secret?