It’s almost August and I’m ready to embark on several much needed days off (5 to be exact) from work. A temporary break from the daily routine of pixels, creative deadlines, motion-tweens, copy decks and revision documents.
This is my world on any given week, and while I absolutely love my job and the process of making things interactive for our clients at OSL, it’s nice to get away once and a while and soak up some vitamin D with family and friends.
Desynchronizing from these activities and changing one’s environment (subliminal voice inside is telling me to turn off that computer now!) can be a healthy prescription to clear one’s mind and revitalize creativity while fostering a renewed sense of inspiration towards work endeavours.
This is a great technique (getting away that is) for physically, mentally, and creatively recharging. It’s like hitting a giant reset button, rebooting one’s physiological system just like a internal CPU, and it’s something we should all strive to do periodically to maintain peak performance.
In fact, with so much emphasis on work—sometimes 60+ hours in a heavy week, the sudden onset of vacation time feels almost like one of the kicks from Inception causing me to instantaneously wake up and leave one constructed reality for another. Where am I headed next?
At the same time, with the notion I’ll not be working for the next 5 days, I briefly imagine what I’ll be doing 20 – 30-years into the future when I enter the so-called ‘time-rich’ leisure demographic.
In my dad’s generation you could easily identify these people—they drove Cadillacs, lived down south for the better part of the year (usually in Florida), wore their socks up to their knees and complained continuously about the weather.
While I’m not keen to end up livin’ la vida loca with the Clark Griswold set down south, I do wonder how I’ll occupy my time once I enter the infamous ‘retirement’ years. Perhaps I’ll travel, paint or write books—maybe blog like I’m doing right now? Will the concept of retirement even exist 30-years from now? Will books and blogging be replaced by immersive interactive literature pieces? I don’t know.
What I do know is that tomorrow has no specific agenda or list of deliverables to be completed for end-of-day—just spontaneous unplanned events connecting freely with no constraints in sight. Ahh, I feel alive.
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