Throughout history people have intuited that such puritanical devotion to perpetual busyness does not in fact translate to greater productivity and is not particularly healthy. To summarize, Americans and their brains are preoccupied with work much of the time. And in several surveys Americans have admited that they obsessively check and respond to e-mails from their colleagues or feel obliged to get some work done in between kayaking around the coast of Kauai and learning to pronounce humuhumunukunukuapua'a. Yet a survey by Harris Interactive found that, at the end of 2012, Americans had an average of nine unused vacation days. In America, Canada, Japan and Hong Kong workers average 10 days off each year. In the Netherlands 26 days of vacation in a given year is typical. has no federal laws guaranteeing paid time off, sick leave or even breaks for national holidays. In contrast to the European Union, which mandates 20 days of paid vacation, the U.S. and Australia revealed that on average employees spend more than half their workdays receiving and managing information rather than using it to do their jobs half of the surveyed workers also confessed that they were reaching a breaking point after which they would not be able to accommodate the deluge of data. A 2010 LexisNexis survey of 1,700 white collar workers in the U.S., China, South Africa, the U.K. and other industrialized countries would wholeheartedly agree with Taft’s sentiments, even if they are not as committed to meditation. ![]() “I call that my ‘mind being not full.’ Currently, the speed of life doesn’t allow enough interstitial time for things to just kind of settle down.” “When you go on a long retreat like that there’s a kind of base level of mental tension and busyness that totally evaporates,” Taft says. Gradually, his mind seemed to sort through a backlog of unprocessed data and to empty itself of accumulated concerns. He spent most of his time meditating, practicing yoga and walking through fields and along trails in surrounding farmland and woods, where he encountered rafters of turkeys leaping from branches, and once spotted an otter gamboling in a swamp. For 92 days he lived at Insight Meditation Society’s Forest Refuge facility, never speaking a word to anyone else. Taft had been on similar retreats before, but never one this long. After selling his home and packing all his belongings in storage, he traveled to the small rural community of Barre, Mass., about 100 kilometers west of Boston, where every year people congregate for a three-month-long “meditation marathon.” In 2011, while finalizing plans to move from Los Angeles to San Francisco, he decided to take an especially long recess from work and the usual frenzy of life. “In a normal working day in modern America, there’s a sense of so much coming at you at once, so much to process that you just can’t deal with it all,” Taft says. It needs some downtime.įreelance writer and meditation teacher Michael Taft has experienced his own version of cerebral congestion. There is so much more to do-so much work I genuinely enjoy-but my brain is telling me to stop. Even if I began the day undaunted, getting through my ever growing list of stories to write and edit, e-mails to send and respond to, and documents to read now seems as futile as scaling a mountain that continuously thrusts new stone skyward. My eyes trace the contour of the same sentence two or three times, yet I fail to extract its meaning. The glare of my computer screen appears to suddenly intensify. Every now and then during the workweek-usually around three in the afternoon-a familiar ache begins to saturate my forehead and pool in my temples.
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