I don’t remember when I heard it or the specific circumstances, but I do remember the thud in my gut confirming the truth of the term. I can hear my friend utter the words, “You keep waiting for a cigarette break, there are none, not when you are doing the actual work of your life.” I remember thinking, well shit. The real work of life never ends. Your brain will want you to believe it will, that you’ll be able to take a break, maybe even a short vacation. You might even try, only to discover how torturous it is to stop, to listen to the voices that this work of life helps to keep at bay. Those are often the mean, very often delusional voices coming from that same brain that told you to stop in the first place.
Sometimes I’m working and its rough, there is a birthing occurring and it feels like a long time of labor, with the pains, the frustrations, the scowling and yelling at anyone who feels like they have been a part of this creative pregnancy. I feel as if I have come to understand why pregnant women seem irrationally hostile towards their partners. In fact, its happening as I write this and so I’ll give a rundown of how it goes. I think about what is going to happen next, as I sit here, typing in a choppy staccato, getting what feels like this very important plan out of my brain, my heart and my body, through my fingers, into the laptop keys, forming somewhat coherent words, phrases and sentences. Resistance is high. There feels like a wave of manic creation wanting to shoot out of every part of my body. The feeling is one of great hope and victory locked behind a wall, beating on it to get out. The staccato of expression, resistance, expression, sigh, dear lord will this end one way or another soon, pockets of flow, resistance, expression. And then I hear the words in my head, oh I should take a break soon. I know what this means. This is my brain trying to stop this pain of resistance, this horror. Only I know what is on the other side. It is flow and it is glorious. But I want that cigarette break where I can just relax and not think of a thing, which is nigh impossible at this point. In this moment the bright lightbulb goes off, oh I can take a break – from this particular piece of the project right now and then move on to some other work, like writing this blog post.
That’s as much of a break as you get in this life at this point, if you are doing the actual work of your life. You don’t get to take a vacation from your life, ever. You simply get to move your attention, for a little while, to some other part of your life, yourself, your surroundings, that needs that attention until its time to move it again, somewhere else. You don’t get to enjoy and savor that long drag of checking out, spacing out into nothingness any longer. In experience, its actually nowhere near as enjoyable as you seem to keep believing you remember it to be. You only get to savor the knowing that once you’ve started the work, its better if you never stop. And that you should probably quit smoking cigarettes anyway.