refocus your mind

I have a good friend who I’ve known ever since I was a law intern and she was a young lawyer at a downtown litigation firm. The firm was pretty high pressure: the lawyers who worked there were constantly running back and forth from court, handling tricky personal injury and employment law cases.

As it happened, on her off-time my friend was a pretty avid skier. I don’t know that she’d have called herself an expert, but she loved it. And if you’d asked her why, she didn’t talk about the scenery, or the brisk weather, or anything like that. But I do remember her telling me that her favourite part about skiing was the fact that when she was on the slopes, skiing was all she could think about. “There’s no space for thinking about motions or summary judgments or anything related to work,” she said. “All your brain has time for is how to navigate your way down the mountain safely. It’s amazing.”

If there’s one thing I’ve learned after spending the last eighteen months dabbling in various activities, it’s this: having a hobby that allows us to turn our minds off work and test ourselves in a new way is good for our brains. It’s good for our mental health, and it’s good for our emotional health. And it might be the secret to a happy life.

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After turning in my manuscript, I realized that I had a little bit of space in my schedule, so I decided to take a long three-day weekend, without even so much as a thought about work. So on Friday, I returned to the pottery studio after almost six weeks away. And it showed.

But it was fun to be back at it.

Then my friend Katherine Center texted me: “Hey!! Any chance you want to take an abstract painting class with me this Saturday?"

Why, yes. Yes, I do.

So we made plans, and on Saturday, we headed over to the brightly colourful studio of Leslie Gaworecki for our class. And it was just so lovely.

And then I spent the rest of the weekend playing in my journal. It was a busy weekend, but it was so restorative.

So here’s my wish for us all this week: that we find some time to do something that so captures our minds that we can’t think about work — even if we love our jobs. Because as I said, doing things that we love — even if we’re bad at them — is one of the secrets to a joyful life.

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