While concentrating on the business of getting through each day, taking good care of my divorce mediation clients and doing my best to take care of myself, I sometimes get lost in the weeds with no understanding of how I landed there. I know I’m not the only one who worries about things that don’t improve by the mere fact that I’m worrying about them. And to be transparent, I also pre-worry, which is even more useless. Do you do the same?
When this happens, I figure that I simply need to take a break, put things on pause and, hopefully, regain my perspective.
So, while I’m making a conscious effort not to worry, or pre-worry, I’ve decided that break time doesn’t preclude wonder time. With the assumption that you also might wonder (and maybe wander), I ask you the following questions:
1. Do you look away when you see blood and guts on television?
2. Has someone else’s political post on social media caused you to change your own mind?
3. Who decided that overly thick and fake-looking false eyelashes are attractive?
4. Do doorbells on television and sirens on the radio fool you almost all the time?
5. When did “of course” become a synonym for “you’re welcome?”
6. Why is it no longer acceptable to enter two spaces after a period?
7. When did it become okay to insert what I call the superfluous pronoun? (My mother, she is a great cook. The Golden Knights, they have a huge fan base.)
I’m going to stop now and take a break from adding to this list. I hope it doesn’t seem like I’m ranting or complaining. I’m not. Nor am I judging. I’m simply sharing some of my not-so-deep thoughts. I’m curious to see if you’re on the same wavelength and, if not, what you wonder about while you’re taking a break.
So, on a more serious note, I’d love for all of us to use our break time to regain some perspective. In this era of political division, racism, war(s), voting rights, women’s rights, vaccination confusion, gender identity, and everything else we think about and talk about, it seems to me that we forget to discuss perspective. Whether it’s a white person weighing in on Black Lives Matter, whether it’s a man weighing in on a woman’s reproductive rights, and whether it’s a heterosexual weighing in on the LGBTQ+ community, perspective is an essential topic for discussion.
I also don’t want to lose sight of our intentions. Do I intend to convince my neighbor’s elderly father that he’s wrong about abortion? Is it my intention to make my friend feel ignorant because she chose not to get a Covid vaccine? Of course not.
Please take a break for a few minutes from whatever you’ve been doing or need to do, and share your thoughts about taking a break to revisit your perspective and your intentions.
And if that’s too deep to ponder while you’re taking your break, feel free to answer my questions.
