Life, Love, and Comics. Part III : Rest
Welcome back to another belated but insightful instalment of Life, Love, and Comics. For this brief topic, I’m going to talk a bit about the necessity of Rest. With Rest comes an important factor in sustaining your Craft and your life. This is where we learn to negotiate a system of harmony between the many different things we love and value in our lives by agreeing on one thing: When it comes time to stop working, its time to STOP WORKING.
REST
Maybe by now you’ve been expanding your idea of what it is to be successful, and have been working at your Craft diligently. You’ve overcome personal resistance, and are starting to see improvements in your attitude towards your Craft. Perhaps you’ve even been actively running or swimming or doing whatever in order to help build a discipline for practising your Craft. Good on yah. Now…its time to take a break.
Rest is a vital part of a productive work schedule. As I’m writing this, its currently 4:50 pm on a Friday afternoon, and in 40 minutes, I’m done writing this blog (also part of the reason this blog post will be short). That’s that. The work is always waiting for me, in some fashion or another, when I get back to it on Monday.
Don’t believe me? Go ahead, keep working non-stop at your Craft for a full year, all in, and see if you aren't completely burnt out, alone, and disgusted with your passion. Its tempting to keep going, especially since you’ve worked so hard at just getting started. Once you’ve started to develop a work flow and a discipline for sustaining it, it can be just as difficult to turn off that focus and energy. But difficult as it may be (probably not that hard), it is necessary.
When and how you take breaks is up to you, the important part is that you schedule them and stick to keeping that time free for yourself or other activities. If finding just a few hours a day or week is all you can get just to work at your Craft, well then scheduling breaks for rest may not be an immediate concern. But if you are finding yourself working a lot at your Craft, near to 20-35 hours a week, than it is important to treat what your doing as “work” and be sure to give yourself a break.
See, rest and relaxation are parts of a work flow. Its absolutely necessary. There is no blue ribbon for working faster and harder, regardless of other's demands on you. There is only the quality you achieve with the time you have. Negotiating an on/off relationship with your craft is also necessary to maintaining “on” relationships with friends, family, and partners in your everyday life. My wife has an equally if not more demanding job and lifestyle, and though I value my time, craft, and goals, I am not about to take an arrogant, selfish position in our relationship that puts my needs above hers. We both communicate with each other on what is important, and often quality time together is important. A weekend vacation. A simple walk together where we chat. Taking turns making dinner during the week. Being present with that person, and letting go of other demands is what keeps me sane. What's the point of all this hard work if you only just drive other's you care about away, ruin your appetite for what you love, and find yourself completely exhausted from it?
There’s even been occasions where the breaks I made a point of taking were to simply sit and read a book on a Sunday afternoon. I had deadlines. I had work that could have used those extra few hours. I had work simmering on the back burner of my mind that was always getting put off, but here I was, taking a few hours to relish in doing nothing. The reason I made that choice was because the work, personal or commissioned, that I was constantly thinking about was stressing me out, making me depressed, and spiteful. And it was starting to show in my daily life with my friends and my wife. Taking that afternoon to just read a book was an important reminder that though our professional lives have demands we must meet, the personal time to rest and rejuvenate is just as important.
One last important, maybe absolutely critical, piece of advice that I want to emphasise here about rest is…Well, that’s that. Its now 5:30 pm Friday afternoon. See y’all later! In the next instalment I’ll be discussing the final frontier of personal development, an absolutely critical step we must all take with our Craft: the importance of Critical Evaluation!
