Amy Swift Crosby

It is almost always easier to work.

Even when work is stressful, it’s an environment that has a beginning and end, with tasks associated with workflow that equal some-kind-of-something in the end. We generally know what our contribution amounts to, how our presence impacts the whole. There’s a certain metric that we innately understand when it comes to work — less gray area, more punctuation.

Consider the discipline it takes to meditate, workout, sit down and read with your child or play Legos — even to go on vacation. These are all beautiful, fulfilling, healthy activities once you do them, but so often, work swallows anything deemed “extra” because it’s, A. Culturally justifiable and B. Infinitely easier to be productive when it’s obvious. I think most of us would agree that there are days and weeks that with all our “busy-ness” we weren’t actually that impactful toward something we really care about, that we really want to happen, that would really make a difference.

So as we go into this holiday period, one of my “rest” goals is to think bigger and upward, rather than in bits and pieces moving forward. I want to try to stay in the idea stratosphere — rather than the production one. We don’t get that luxury too much because we have jobs to do, people to pay (and get paid from), and missions to make real. This “blue sky” level of creative thinking (or blue ocean as a friend of mine insists), is a unique muscle that “works” without being at a desk, “produces” without typing a single Google search, and “grows” without a marketing strategy.

With that, I wish you a very happy holiday — and hope this gentle push gives you added permission go higher and deeper into something good. For me, it will only qualify if I can do it and have nothing to show for it –except a renewed energy (and potentially an idea worth executing) by January 1^st.

Remember back in the day, when you ‘d go to a restaurant, and if you found yourself to be the first of your party to arrive, you had to wait at the bar — alone?  You looked around. You watched other people having fun or in intimate conversations. You glanced at your watch. It was a little bit painful, especially if you were waiting on a date, or a professional contact you’d never laid eyes on. There was a vulnerability to it.

I worry that these transitional moments, or any moment when in the past we might have had to sit in our own presence, have been hijacked by our devices. We either find ourselves feeling pressed to be productive in EVERY POSSIBLE SECOND, or worse, feel that in moments when we could be pausing/breathing/observing, that we should at least look like we have something to do. If I’m at a party, and feel uninterested or introverted, my phone provides a paradise of relief and distraction. But, that’s kind of bullsh$t, right? What a copout.

I’m worried that no one knows how to be bored or clumsy or awkward anymore. In fact I’m thinking the younger generation is missing a litany of other sufferings that make for a multi-dimensional person, and we (elders) are cheating ourselves out of some unexpected epiphanies that come from choosing (actively) to do something in real time/real life — even when we could be swiping/checking/responding.

Just like actors used cigarettes as a storytelling device, and regular people used them as a social wingman, so must we view our phones for what they’ve become; something to do….when we need something to do.

But I think we may be missing out. Imagine the people we might meet or cool things we might witness or conversations we might overhear or character we might build…by not looking down and disappearing into an alternate, easier universe at the first possible discomfort?

We might have to actually live with ourselves and all our confronting humanity. Huh.