This week, I invite you to join me on my travels. I have returned to the land of my birth, South Africa, where I am visiting my aging parents. I confess that it was with some trepidation that I agreed to go and spend a week with them out in the bushveld. My cell phone does not work, I have no internet connectivity and my only contact with the outside world is a flickering television set prone to blackouts. We are staying in a thatched rondawel (a typically African style round hut made out of mud or stone) in the middle of a game park.
Because the park does not have “the big five” (lions, elephants, hippo, rhinos and wildebeest), we are permitted to walk along the miles of trails. The best time of day to go out is dawn or dusk when the animals gather at the waterholes to drink, but even during the warm autumn days, when the temperature hovers in the lower seventies, we encounter zebra and giraffe peacefully grazing together, or herds of impala, springbuck and waterbuck hiding behind the thorn-bushes or darting through the grasslands.
As the days pass, the urgency of the phone calls I am supposed to make, recedes. The need to constantly check my i-Phone dwindles into the vague memory of a forgotten nervous tic, and the rest of the world feels irrelevant in this peaceful place.
I actually work each day more productively than usual – I have a client assignment and to write a report – yet I have never felt so relaxed and at ease. What are the secrets of the African bush that I will be able to bring back with me to my over-pressured, stressed and busy, American life? In sharing this with you, perhaps I will get a better understanding of what the simple life offers and how to tune back into it – and perhaps you will learn something, too.
Here are some of the factors that seem to make the difference:
Spend time with older people. Their pace is slower. They make your own lapses of memory and absent-mindedness seem more normal. They are done with the striving and struggling, the hustle and bustle of the world of ambition. Biologically, they need to take a more mellow approach to life. The multi-tasking and rush to achieve that drives so many of us seems a bit bizarre and pointless. Being older, you are forced to live more in the present and less in the future. You can also deal with small challenges and be happy when you have overcome them rather than getting stressed about big unknowns over which you have very little control.
Spend time watching animals. A family of long-tailed monkeys scurries and scrambles over our roof every day checking us out and enviously eyeing our bunch of bananas. A mother dassie, an African rodent that looks like a cross between a guinea pig and a beaver, patiently suckles her young on our front step. A giraffe, tall and knock-kneed, nibbles at leaves on the highest branches while his zebra companions munch the grass at his feet. The single-horned male buck accompanying a herd of females skittishly leaps at the sound of suspicious human footsteps. A guinea fowl perches atop a mound in the African dusk with the sun a huge red disk in the sky. The fowl screeches piercingly bidding the day farewell. I am entranced by their stillness and humbled by their simple acceptance of what each day brings.
Give yourself a break from technology. My misgivings have subsided, and I am delighting in this old-fashioned way of living without 24/7 interruptions, communication and accountability. Productivity experts tell us to monitor our constant message checking and tuning into social media, and it feels great to lose the sheer madness of minute to minute communication. I am planning to be more disciplined about this when I get home.
Allow blocks of time to focus on a single task. For the first time ever, I have set my writing goals and been able to complete them as planned without breaking into a sweat and without forcing myself through walls of resistance. Work has felt easy and pleasurable. I can think clearly, write quickly and effectively and enjoy my post-work rewards daily. My mind is clear, I am focused and unstressed, and there is no interference getting in my way. If only I could replicate these conditions back in my office, I would be much better off. I am definitely going to work on blocking out interruptions, by others or myself, when I return.
Take leisurely meals and lots of exercise. We eat simply, improvizing meals from the random ingredients we brought with us. I take my morning cup of tea on the front step as day breaks listening to the chirping, twittering and screeching of birds, and our meals are relaxing, sit-down affairs, three times a day. The fresh air and long walks in natural surroundings cannot help but make us feel healthy. Surely it will not be that difficult to replicate some of these conditions when I am back home. Taking a walk along city blocks or suburban streets will have to substitute, but the escape from indoors and the use of the body replenishes energy that can be recycled into more “serious” pursuits.
Read a good book. Books allow me to escape into other worlds. After all of the professional reading, news and current affairs, emails and other stuff my poor brain has to process every day, it is a sheer delight to pick up a book that has nothing to do with my current life. And, there are countless times when a piece of literature inspires me or gives me a creative jolt helping me see my world differently or illuminating a new path.
Sleep when you are tired; don’t fight it when you are not. Yes, I know, this will not always be possible when I am back at home. An afternoon nap is not usually programmed into the work day. But I am learning to get up and do things when I am not sleepy even if it is at 3 a.m. instead of tormenting myself to get the “required” amount of sleep. Somehow or other, you get what you need when you listen to yourself.
This blog may reach you a little late, but I hope my insights from the African bushveld somehow inspire you to “chill” as you manage your work life.
Fredia Woolf , founder of Woolf Consulting, blogs to help people improve their workplace effectiveness and optimize their careers. As an organizational consultant and leadership coach, she works with clients to increase insight, inspiration and impact. She can be reached at fwoolf@woolfconsulting.com.
Photo credit: Jerzy Strzelecki
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Last updated on April 27th, 2010 at 01:52 pm
“I had to face herds of zebra and hike through thick thornbushes to find a working computer.”
Thank you Fredia for the extraordinary effort to get us your post and I wish you a safe and hectic free return journey from South Africa.