I’m not great at relaxing. Ok, everyone who knows me in face to face life, stop laughing. Maybe its slightly an understatement. Last week I kept biting inside my cheek. I complained about it on Twitter. The always very wise Kate Foy responded with the suggestion that I should get a massage since I was stressed. If the colleague in Australia can see by my tweets that I am stressed, I figured I needed to pay attention.

It was my wedding anniversary last week, so we headed down to Yachats on the Oregon Coast. The night before, we found the Overleaf Lodge and Spa on the web. We couldn’t get massage appointments at the last minute, but it was on the waterfront and had a pool of hot water overlooking the ocean, so we headed down.

Starting to relax

I love the sound of the surf. The area where we visited had waves crashing on rocks. We sat in the spa watching the sun go down over the water. I started to relax. After I got back to our room, I went over to open the window to hear the waves better and shut my finger in the slider. Black stripe on fingernail within moments.

I started to wonder about the relaxation thing.

I decided to relax in front of the fireplace listening to the surf anyway. It was really lovely. I woke up relaxed, and promptly walked into a chair. Kicked it very hard. Lie on the floor moaning hard. Now I have a very black toe to match the stripe on my fingernail.

Now I’m really wondering about this relaxing thing.

When I don’t relax regularly, and then I do, its like suddenly finding myself in someone elses body. I lose sense of where am in space. And I often find the result painful. Its a classic catch-22. Need to relax really bad, relax and damage body parts. I’ve got to find a better way, which probably involves relaxing regularly. I’ve been pretty good about making time for exercise. So carving out more time to do less is a bit counter intuitive, but I’m seeing it needs to be part of this redesigning the day to day life and business.

Not sure when I’m going to have time to get work done with all this taking care of various parts of self. I recognize in theory, I should be way more efficient when I am actually working if I have balance in my life. I’m still skeptical, but I’m continuing the experiment.