I’m writing this from Bali.
Four weeks. My whole body, unclenched.
This has become an annual thing for me now, something I genuinely treasure. But I want to be honest about something. It has taken years of work to get here. Years of personal development, before I could take four weeks away from my business and my life without guilt, without shame, without fear sitting underneath it.
I wrote recently about the plan not being the point, about how genuine rest rarely starts with a big overhaul, it starts with one clear decision.If you read that one, you’ll know I talked about the clients who come to me wanting real time away from their business, and how we start small.
I want you to know I didn’t start with four weeks either.
I started exactly where I tell my clients to start. A four-day weekend. The Friday and the Monday, actually off. Then I got a little braver. I started tacking extra days onto public holidays. Then I began using Easter properly, here in Australia the way the public holidays fall some years, that can mean nine or ten days off in one stretch. Slowly, over years, that grew into four weeks.
Nobody goes from a four-day weekend to a month away overnight. It’s built, one small proof at a time.
Why Bali, specifically. Partly practical. It’s warmer than a Sydney winter, and I don’t enjoy winter, I never have. But it’s more than that. Bali is a community I’ve grown to know and love over the years. I feel at home here. I feel safe here. And at the same time, there’s a real anonymity in it, a privacy. Nobody here has any expectations of who I am back in Australia. I’ve found that to be a genuine source of freedom, a chance to decompress in ways I didn’t know were possible until I felt it.
I find it genuinely difficult to holiday at home. My husband and I have tried it more than once. It has never given us the same sense of rest and replenishment as a proper holiday somewhere else. I don’t know if that’s the same for you. I suspect for a lot of us, it is.
There’s something else I want to say before I go quiet on email for a while.
I’m writing this as someone living with significantly reduced capacity, managing a complex chronic neurological condition. I too need to practise what I preach. And I think this matters even more for those of us living with, or working alongside, chronic illness, chronic injury or chronic pain. Sometimes we don’t just need a break from work. We need a break from the appointments. From recording every symptom. From tracking every medication, every small blip in the day. That management is its own kind of labour, and it deserves its own kind of rest.
So here’s my reflection for you today, the one I keep coming back to myself.
When will you start to acknowledge your capacity, not just your capability? Your ability to produce is not the whole measure of you. Neither is what you can achieve while running on empty.