Just a Little Ways Off…
Daily Meditation #358–2/17/2023
Taking some time off to “recuperate” can be beneficial.
Letting loose to enjoy a good meal with your spouse — off your diet! — can be a real treat.
Having a little sabbatical after you 8 years in Uni probably would be a great reset.
— — —
Say you’re walking from LA, California, to New York City.
You’ve got a straight line all plotted out and you’re just going to follow that straight line all the way there, all 2,550 miles.
Some point nearly halfway, you’ll pass a bit south of Wichita. A few days later, you’ll be south of St. Louis by a few miles. Exciting!
At the start of your second morning, you wake up feeling refreshed and ready to go. Firing up your digital map, it calculates your straight line a little different than you remember…
Today it looks like it has you aimed about .5° differently.
“Oh well,” you shrug, energized and rarring to get back on your journey, “It’s only a small difference!”
— — —
This “small difference,” though literally just a half of a degree will end up placing you nearly 50 miles south or north of New York.
While mile one, five, ten, or twenty on day one or two it will seem insignificant…by the second half and the final stretch it will be “catastrophic” if your plan was to end up in the specific place of NYC!
This is why when we decide to “take a break” from that which brings us passion — finishing our degree, stopping the gym and diet, or following a wake/sleep routine — it can end up carrying us vastly off course if we aren’t conscientious.
Taking a break is always a good idea. Don’t mistake it!
But the “break” needs to be intentional. It should be part of a plan. Otherwise, we risk having our “.5° off course” moment.
We get out of our 8 years of University, get the brewrista job and end up hanging around for 10 years…
We pause our gym membership for a month for a vacation and end up ballooning over 200 pounds…
We are laid off and decide to collect unemployment for a bit, only to become a statistic in the system…
Our time being blown off course can, of course, have its own benefits (tomorrow’s meditation maybe?), but when we have intentions for ourselves — a way of being we aspire to — that “.5°” can become catastrophic over a year, three, or five plus.
In closing — take the damn break!
But define for yourself an end to it and then be prepared to, as Google Maps says, “recalculate.”
Follow for daily philosophical meditations.
These are distillations from my coming book “YouDaimonia: the Ancient Philosophy of Human Flourishing.”
