Thoughtful spots

I recall one afternoon that I was really dragging. I was traveling from one appointment to another and as I like to do, worked in a coffee and donut stop. About 15 minutes later I felt more energetic. I’m not sure whether it was the caffeine or the replenished blood sugar, but I felt remarkably refreshed. That’s the first time I really noticed the value of stopping for donuts, oops I mean of taking a nutrition break.

Thought breaks are just as essential as nutrition breaks. I can stay on task for a while, but at some point I need a thought break to refresh my thought center. I can’t start with the break – I need to apply some seat time to get the process started, but eventually I need a change of activity and scene to let additional thoughts emerge. How often have you sent a memo, then walked down the hall only to have thought of an additional point you should have made in that memo? So don’t send that memo until you’ve had a thought break. Before you consider some thought-requiring task done, set it aside, get a change of activity and scene, and come back to it. New ideas will bubble up.

You can make a pretty good guess about where I like to head for a change in activity and scene. Yep, a local natural-ish or uncrowded spot. We’re lucky to have plenty of them. If I had to develop a tag line for our area, I’d want to combine ‘real nature, real close’ and ‘uncrowded.’ That’s a good combination for thought breaks. Other places have forests; other places have lakes, rivers and wetlands. But we have the advantage of having all these places close by and without huge crowds to have to share them with. I guess we should be pretty deep-thinking people with all those thoughtful spots available. But then having them available and taking advantage of them are two different things. Just because they are there doesn’t mean we always use them.