๐ Practice: Introducing the Beauty Break
A little practice to carve out a corner of your day to be immersed in your senses (and stop running laps in your head)
There is a metal basket on a shelf in our kitchen where I stick things that do not have an easy or obvious resolution. We call it The Doom Basket (IYKYK1). I used to also put left-behind toys in there too, but now that has gotten itโs very own Doom Basket because I thought if it had itโs own basket I would surely be more likely to take it with me when I go upstairs during the day. hahahaha.
A few highlights from the current Doom Basket situation:
A yellow, plastic accordion tube Oscar got in a goodie bag.2
A home poo testing kit for kids that I bought a year ago before we found a solution for Oscarโs eczema
Baby Yoda
Three catalogues โ two for womenโs workwear that made me nostalgic for the days when I was perceived below the ribs (aspirational) and one for gardening supplies (practical)
574 animal trading cards from fruit roll packets bundled with a broccoli rubber band that I really should just throw out
An inscrutable but probably important letter from the insurance company that will absolutely require a phone call
A blue plastic folder filled with kindergarten art and random classwork thatโs too good to throw out but too old for the fridge
Thereโs a day about once every 4 months where the pain of figuring out what to do with the contents of these baskets will be lower than the self loathing I feel when I look at them, but that today is not that day. Oscar is home sick with strep, I need to review at least 4 different projects from three different clients, respond to some emails, refresh Substack 5,000 times to see if anyone likes me and scroll LinkedIn before making dinner and trying to finish this post.
Last week yโall wrote me back and were like SAME. Life feels like an endless series of leaps between tasks at work and roles at home โ if we do manage to make a little time for ourselves weโre either too exhausted to be creative or spend the entire time hearing that little productivity gremlin with her goddamn count-down clock asking you what youโre doing to do with the next 27 minutes and 30 seconds of your one wild and precious life.
NO PRESSURE! ๐คก
Forgive me quoting this entire passage from Beauty: The Invisible Embrace, but I have not seen anyone capture this feeling so well as our dear friend John (the emphasis and paragraph breaks are mine):
โTraditionally, a journey was a rhythm of three forces: time, self and space. Now the digital virus has truncated time and space. Marooned on each instant, we have forfeited the practice of patience, the attention to emergence and delight in the Eros of discovery. The self has become anxious for what the next instant might bring. This greed for destination obliterates the journey. โฆ The digital desire for the single instant schools the mind in false priority.
Each instant proclaims its own authority and the present image demands the complete attention of the eye. There is no sense of natural sequence where an image is allowed to emerge from its background and context when the time is right, the eye is worthy and the heart is appropriate. [โฆ]
But a great journey needs plenty of time. It should not be rushed; if it is, your life becomes a kind of abstract package tour devoid of beauty and meaning. There is such a constant whirr of movement that you never know where you are. You have no time to give yourself to the present experience. When you accumulate experiences at such a tempo, everything becomes thin. Consequently, you become ever more absent from your life and this fosters emptiness that haunts the heart.โ
It was only recently that I began to be able to read fiction again. Unstructured time made me anxious. After 20 years slogging it out in the American workforce, my brain was so locked into a cycle of perpetual optimization that I couldnโt even enjoy a great book if I wasnโt getting some kind of a life-lesson baked in. I still struggle to sit with a piece of writing for longer than a few minutes before the urge to check and be sure thereโs not an email or Slack message or notification with a smaller, more discrete task where I can get my dopamine fix.
This is a real thing by the way โ the experts are split on whether to call it โaddictionโ but our brains actually physiologically change in response to all this fractured time. Itโs not just that you donโt have enough willpower, itโs your phone is a mini-casino of social slot machines and itโs made us all pick up our phone all the time to see if everybody still likes us.3
Thatโs why this week we are doing an exercise I am calling โBeauty Breaks.โ The good news about neuroplasticity is that we can rewire things and claw back the pieces of our broken brains!
Make Time for a Beauty Break
For the next 5 days, Iโm inviting everyone to schedule 15-30 minutes of time to take a โbeauty break.โ Hereโs how each break works:
Find 15-30 minutes once a day for the next 5 days where you can be totally alone. No kids, no colleagues, no bosses. Seriously โ unless there is a life threatening emergency, you are in the cone of silence. Tell your spouse.
Put the time on your calendar. For real. Make it OOO or something so any new meeting invites get bounced back. It will be OK! People will figure out what to do if youโre not there for 30 minutes, I promise.
Turn on do not disturb on all your devices. Close your email, close your slack, close messages, delete instagram (j/k, kind of) โ whatever you find too tempting to ignore, hide it from yourself.
Do a 5 minute guided meditation of your choice โ I dug around for a free one for you and added it in here so you donโt have an excuse that you couldnโt find one. HA. But seriously, the meditation is really important โ a big part of what I notice in my interviews and my coaching clients (and in my own life) is that when I am the most exhausted, I am the most likely to be disconnected from my body. Meditation (even 5 minutes of doing it badly) is the only thing I have found that successfully gets rid of the productivity gremlin and relieves the urge to go-go-go.
After the meditation, take your beauty break!
Day 1: Take a walk (even if itโs raining) and find the following: a good stick, a good rock, a great tree.
Day 2: Read a poem โย just one. Then go back and re-read it a few more times and really sit with it. I found
โs book Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World4 to be a wonderful way to get familiar with poetry again and the slow, gentle approach it requiresDay 3: Watch a Dance Performance My toxic trait is thinking I could join Nicholas Palmquistsโ dance studio even though my physical therapist told me my knee wobbles when I squat. Anyway. Lose yourself here for a bit.
Day 4: Listen to a whole album (not a playlist) Read the lyrics! Read the liner notes if you have a physical copy.
Day 5: Make an epic snack or meal Eat it alone (without your phone), preferably outdoors if itโs nice
Take a few minutes in a journal with a real pen and write down what you noticed about your beauty break. Describe colors you saw, feelings you felt. How you feel after/how you felt before. Whatever comes up! It doesnโt even need to be in complete sentences. Draw or doodle if you feel like it.
On the 5th day, come back here and leave a comment. What did you notice? Were there any beauty breaks that you felt really drawn into? Why? Which ones were hardest to take? Why?
Enjoy!
xo, m
How one walks through the world, the endless small adjustments of balance, is affected by the shifting weights of beautiful things.
Elane Scarry
ICYMI
This oneโs for my neurodivergent girlies
DM to join my crusade to put an end to goodie bags! They are a huge pain! They make kids manic! They are basically dolphin poison! The 80s are over! So many reasons!!
https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2018/dopamine-smartphones-battle-time/
https://bookshop.org/p/books/poetry-unbound-50-poems-to-open-your-world-padraig-o-tuama/18275704?gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQjw3ZayBhDRARIsAPWzx8rMQpcSTm-SnIeJGHKHE5xRGjw1IZvmXtrmHuQtdPvDw16BiV11af0aAvtwEALw_wcB
I'm in, I need this right now! โค๏ธ
ps: at some point, there will be no more toys in the Doom Basket, and you will think this is progress, until you walk by the open door of your teenager's bedroom. try not to faint.
pps: does Tom Holland performing Umbrella count for Day 3? asking for a friend.