We prescribe the medicine all the time to our clients: Take regular breaks. Take time off. Take your vacations. All of them.

You’re not a machine. You can’t go 24/7/365.

You can’t focus on your work to the exclusion of everything else.

You can’t stay at the net responding to constant expectations and demands, responding incessantly to emails and text messages and notifications and alerts.

You can’t play full out day after day without a break.

You wouldn’t run a high performance car for 10,000 miles without a pit stop; without changing the oil; without switching out the tires; without letting the engine cool.

Except that’s what way too many of us do.

Because busy has become a badge of honor. Busy means something. Busy means that we’re important; that we’re significant; that we’re  indispensable.

We buy into the cultural lie that to be successful, we need to be busy; that we need to work more; that we need to work longer, harder, faster; and that to do otherwise somehow means that we’re weak or not motivated or not a team player.

“We are a culture of people who’ve bought into the idea that if we stay busy enough, the truth of our lives won’t catch up with us,” Brené Brown suggests.

Because to stop opens up an existential abyss.

Who are we really if we are not doing and achieving?

So we keep going. Like hamsters on a wheel.

Because we are afraid to stop.

And the collateral damage is huge.

We lose the capacity to create space for ourselves.

We lose the capacity to sit still, to be still, to know the beauty and the grandeur of the here and now.

We lose touch with that place of quiet, that still point within us.

We lose the capacity to be: To just be.

So the medicine to stop is a critical component of our well being.

Not only because it is essential to peak performance (indeed, peak performers in the arts, entertainment and athletics often focus on their work for only 4 or 5 hours a day); but even more important because it is necessary for a life that is rich and full and joyful.

But, as we discovered once again, how challenging it is to pull out of the habit of busy.

Just another week; or another quarter, we told ourselves.

There are clients to serve, coaches to train, books to write, workshops to teach,

What will we miss if we go off the grid? What balls will we drop? Who will we disserve?

We stayed at it for far too long. Months without a meaningful break.

Dishing out the medicine with reckless abandon; and not taking it ourselves.

Until exhausted and depleted we finally did. (And thankfully without resorting to any unnecessary means of prescriptive application.)

We’re on our bicycles in the south of France. Staying in cozy ancient villages. Eating bread and cheese; and drinking wine.

Reveling in the open space.

Feeling the wind and the sun.

Soaking in the quiet.

Connecting with one another; and with ourselves.

So that we can come home again rested and renewed to the do the work we love.

“How are you doing with your medicine?” he asks, reminded and chastised.

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My call to action for this weeks blog: Don’t email me. Just stop.