"Tension is who you think you should be. Relaxation is who you are" - Chinese Proverb
After two days of being on the road, or more precisely on the railroad, I decided to take it easy for a couple of days. After all, I left my last job because I was constantly travelling, and here I am recording for posterity the minutes of voyages around the country, when I should be lounging in a deckchair and ordering in the Tequila Sunrises. Travel is mentally as well as physically exhausting - the brain needs a number of sleep cycles to process the new information received and create new paths and thought branches that allow us eventually to accept changes of environments. Though I'd hardly become Ranulph Fiennes overnight, voyaging as I had as far as the mystical lands of Nuneaton and Cambridge, I still felt I was owed a couple of days to myself to relax and to recuperate - finally finish Mass Effect 2, actually practice some piano, cook some amazing food, all those kinds of things we like to do when we are enjoying precious time off.
However, I was surprised by just how impossible I have found it to "relax" in the last two days. As I have a long-standing agreement with Jo that I would continue to produce tea and breakfast for her in the mornings while she showers (one of the few things that make me worth living with), I find myself, at 8.30 in the morning, in the uncomfortable position of being all dressed up (admittedly in pyjamas) with no place to go. Normally I would have thought that my body would allow me to return to bed, perhaps with a paperback and another cup of English Breakfast, and gently while the morning away. But even attempting to lie on the sofa for a few minutes felt weirdly uncomfortable. TV became unpalatable (there really is nothing on, even with Sky, during the day), the Internet unappealing, even reading was somehow unsatisfying.
Instead, the last two days have passed somewhat in a blur. I haven't quite relaxed, yet neither have I achieved anything. I have move from distraction to distraction, from piano to console to computer to kitchen to TV to book to radio to phone, and found I could spend no more than ten minutes on one activity before tiring and moving on. Almost at the midpoint through the journey of my days of freedom, I became panicked that without the shadow of work constantly threatening me, the light of rest and relaxation couldn't shine.
Perhaps I have spent so much time convincing myself that these forty-two days would be filled to the brim with ceaseless personal activity and constant growth - every second of every day packing in all the wonderful things I wanted to do that I couldn't before because of work. But what I have learnt now is that, just like good cannot exist without evil and black is useless without white, work is only a grind when you can't relax, and relaxation is only a joy when you know that work is around the corner. Quasi-work such as a quick trip to see relatives in Cambridge will not fool my body into thinking it has earned a day or so of hard nothing. As long as I remain in a state of employment flux - technically jobless but with a start date, a contract and pension forms to fill in - I'm condemned to remain in a parallel relaxation flux.
To those of you who can switch off, lean back and have nothing but your thoughts about you, I salute you. Either your work-life balance is perfect, or you are just very, very lucky.
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