The Belly of the Beast

Holidays used to be like hiccups in my routine. Don’t get me wrong; I like family time and I like food. But the time off—that was tough. The thought of free time was just so disconcerting. How would I fill the time? How will I make ends meet on my paycheck-to-paycheck cycle with a day off?

Back then I spent a long time keeping my head down, staying focused, plowing ahead. Even my free time was overly purposeful: I did a lot of living in those years, a lot of writing, and I even managed to do a lot of traveling. With all of this, I added experiences and built a reserve of stories to tell. (As a friend said just this weekend, “Travel will change something inside you, whether or not you realize it at the time.”)

Still, I knew full well the lessons I needed to learn all along: Slow down. Trust the process.

It just took a while to get there.

Isn’t that usually the way, though? We know we need to do something, but we don’t make time to do it. Instead, we put the task in one of those unused rooms in our mind and close the door on it. Simple.

But holidays, birthdays, special occasions, a day off from work—these things don’t stop. They keep popping up like speed bumps on what you think is life’s highway. And over time even the overachievers among us start to realize that holidays are ways of getting us off-course and getting us out of our workaholic comfort zone.

Oh, that dreaded comfort zone where all of the best things tend to stop. A modern Dante Alighieri might add an extra circle in Hell for a lazy comfort zone, and yet another circle for the workaholic version. In either circle, there’s no more learning, no more evolving. They’re cushy traps in which we can spend way too much time, slowly letting our ambitions drift away from us while we make excuses why we can’t reach them. Over time we start telling ourselves we didn’t need those dreams after all. And eventually: What dreams?

But holidays and changes in routine break our rhythm enough that the comfort zone spits us out. Suddenly out of the belly of the beast, we find, much like the Biblical Jonah, that we can’t avoid things anymore. So we take the time to reopen those old doors of clutter in our minds. Sometimes we find treasure that we left behind. Other times we find we only left junk in those rooms—junk that with little effort can now be cleared out to make a fresh, new space.  

Either way, treasure or open space, the discovery of ourselves is priceless.