Just Push Pause

Go ahead.  Make your day.

We got great news at work today – news that is going to make create amazing opportunities for our Company.  News like this also creates an amazing amount of work upfront when you are in marketing.  Your communication plan kicks into high gear.  There are internal memos, conference calls, press releases, phone calls to clients – you name it.  And it all rests on your head.  Time is of the essence, so you want to focus on it completely. 

Unfortunately, what do you do when you get the news sitting in a hotel room in Seattle, far away from it all and already committed to an event that you can’t back out of?

That was my morning.  I was excited and feeling the heat.  After knocking down a few conference calls, I headed out the door – grumbling that I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, doing the wrong thing.  I made call after call on the 30 minute drive to the event, sat in my car and made a few more calls and then begrudgingly went off with a smile on my face to do something I felt was a “waste of time” when I ought to be doing something “more important.”

And a funny thing happened as I cranked my way through the first hour of the meeting: I started to relax.  Standing under the sun on the side of a hill, I stopped thinking about what used to be, what I needed to do today or the million things on the to-do list tomorrow.  Instead, for a few precious hours, I let myself BE.  I looked around, saw how beautiful the world around me was and allowed myself to laugh, to enjoy it and just to be grateful for the moment.  I just pushed Pause on work and let life in.

Today, that’s a hard thing to do.  We work longer hours and do more for less.  We make lists: the workday list, the grocery list, the chore list and more.  We rush through the day, checking things off the list, adding something else to the list, looking down and rarely looking up.  We ask for permission from our bosses, our spouses and ourselves for a few hours off and may feel guilty when we do.  But stopping for an hour or a day doesn’t stop our forward momentum.  It doesn’t stop us.  The world keeps turning just as the song keeps playing, even if you push pause for a little while.

Push Pause.  Work hard, yes.  But don’t forget to enjoy today.