Sometimes you need a break
Breaks are how you learn to start again
“In the quiet, you find the honesty that screams truth.”
–Nikki Rowe
From all appearances, nothing's changed. Your daily routine, your mug of coffee, the satisfying clacks of your keyboard. Then you look closer: the story you're writing doesn't make sense. You pour more time, more attention, more coffee on your troubled narrative, but nothing you’re doing is working. So try doing nothing. Sometimes you need a break.
A break is a pause from a routine. Breaks are healthy. Thinking takes calories and the body machinery needs rest. You gotta oil the gears of creation so you don’t grind yourself into oblivion. Breaks also help with endurance. Attention is like a muscle and it needs downtime to recover and grow.
Breaks are also a part of the work. Every piece of music is dotted with little spaces called rests, where the musician stops making sound. But rests are part of the music, not holes in the song. The same is true for your creative process. A break from the bass line reveals different aspects of melody. Breaks are not blank.
There’s no “off switch” for the mind, only “standby.” Breaks let ideas simmer while you do something else, like find fodder for more story. Or reflect on what you've learned. Breaks can feel like waste, but sometimes the waste is what works.
Breaks can also feel like an ending, but they are an opportunity to reset. An acknowledgement that something needs to change. From pursue the whole body yes:
Your gut is hardest to read. It won’t chatter like the mind. It doesn’t grip you like emotion. But your instinctive reflex is always flickering inside you, like a pilot light. Instinct is a spiritual, and primordial response. It can spark you into action or lard you with resistance.
Only in quiet, can you hear what you truly want. Take a break to make space for new thoughts, new feelings, and new truths. Breaks are how you learn to start again.
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