🏖️ Take a break
For the first time in a long time, I dared to leave my computer at home when I went on vacation. Of course, cellphones can do a lot these days, so it was my back-up plan. I disconnected from my work social media, and I tuned in to spending time with my family. We travelled a bit – by plane, by bus, by ferry. When we look at our photos together, the things we remember the most are those moments in which we played and laughed and the journey itself, not so much the destination. For my kids, it didn’t matter if we were inside La Sagrada Familia; they were ready to run in the next park around the corner and play tickle monster.
Most of the time, when I have a vacation, I go back to Uruguay. I long to be there with my family for the entire year. This time, my cousin’s wedding took us to other corners of the world that I didn’t think I would visit again or get to know, especially now that I’m a mom to a 4 and a 6-year-old. Travel can get expensive.
There’s something about unplugging from the daily routine that allows new connections to happen. I got to see my kids discovering new places, trying to figure out which language to speak, and drawing a map of the world that got bigger. Suddenly, there was a pin in Mallorca, at the house of Tía Verónica, and another in Florence, for Uncle Scott and the cousins.
New connections happened within, too. I was reminded that we have the power to rewrite how we want to be with our work. We have the power to decide when we’ve had enough social media for the day. Taking a break shouldn’t be a luxury; it is vital for us to create, build and dream.
Of course, I know that’s not always possible. I’ve been working for as long as I can remember and I grew up with this idea that you’ll accomplish what you want (in some cases, changing the world; in other cases, just surviving it) only if you work hard. When I was a young reporter in Phoenix, I used to run into this old man at the Fair Trade Coffee Shop, when I was coming back from an assignment, ready to write. He would always tell me: “Take a break, take a break.”
And I’ll reply: “That’s what I’m doing now; I’m working so I can take a break.”
I would love to say that I have rewired myself to take breaks after this vacation, but as soon as I returned and touched the computer, I was flooded at once with everything I had left behind. And I’m fortunate, because I get to do something I really love every day. Just as I opened social media, I felt a heavy heart.
So what’s the takeaway? Realizing that taking a break is much more than a vacation or an escape from work, it’s a chance to reconnect with our purpose, with the people who ground us, and with ourselves. A chance to laugh at the old ways in which we’ve been doing things, a chance to actually remember why we work so hard in the first place. And that changes everything.
—Valeria Fernández, Executive director and founder of Altavoz Lab
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