Tales of A Reforming Workaholic

2021 is the first in my adult life where I didn’t have a full-time job, by choice.

It wasn’t as dreamy as I imagined it would be, especially as an immigrant woman.

To deprogram from the pace and patterns of thirty years of working in ways that hurt me and others around me, I needed help. What was play? What was rest? I found my answers mostly in books.

I established better boundaries with help from author and therapist Nedra Glover Tawwab and went on artist’s dates (walks in the park, museums), as suggested by Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way.

I took more naps, inspired by The Nap Ministry and created new routines informed by clarity coach Rebecca Thompson (movement and meditation, for example).

Most important, I turned inward, to a place that Pico Iyer’s calls Nowhere in his small but mighty book The Art of Stillness (free download with Kindle membership). At the end of a year of exploration, I can affirm how right he is in saying “sometimes I feel that I can best change my life by changing the way I look at it.”

Early in the year, Jenny Odell’s How to do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy set the tone for my journey inward. Doing nothing is not a passive and apathetic act but an active and restorative one — “sustenance for those feeling too disassembled…