A Short Interval

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A Short Interval

Last weekend I finally had the opportunity to see something other than the walls of my apartment and the faces of those I live with - and it’s been a fantastic and much-needed little break!

This pandemic has been a sizable drain on all of our emotions, energies, routines, bank accounts, and lives on the whole.

And of course it is far from over. Despite how well we’ve been doing here in New York, other states have set us back on a national front while the world begins its preparations for a second wave that will likely hit this winter. I do hope we catch up.

On a personal level, I have been running on fumes for quite some time, both generally and creatively. Which is why I’m going to be taking a short interval from my blog posts - just a few weeks - to recharge and gather some new thoughts for moving forward through summer and into the fall!

But before I go for my period of recharge, I’d like to leave you all with a couple thoughts:

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Take A Break?

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Take A Break?

At times we all need to take a break, from one thing or another.

Sometimes it’s work. Sometimes it’s locations. And sometimes it’s people.

There is a fairly common perception that artists cannot afford to take a break from their projects, and I mean that both literally and figuratively. However, that is not actually the case.

We have all been trained to be disciplined, hard-working, and to achieve - all the time. And too often this gets equated to a laziness or some sort of failing whenever an artist decides to take some time off or time away.

But I’m here to tell you that breaks are not only necessary, they are integral to the creation process. Allow me to explain.

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"Snow Day (A Day Off)"

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"Snow Day (A Day Off)"

As a high school student, I had a fairly constant refrain:

“We need a snow day. Give us a snow day. Please.”

Now, this was not me praying or placing a sock under my pillow or attempting to bewitch the skies to make storms appear, this was me on days when school should have been cancelled due to inclement weather even though it had not been.

Some context:

I grew up in Binghamton, NY where most of our snow came from major storms across the interior or from large Nor’easters. So when we had a big storm - even though we knew how to move snow well (it’s upstate NY after all) - we had a snow day.

In high school I moved to Rochester, NY, which sees more snow each year than Binghamton does, mostly due to constant lake effect snow. Because of this, Rochester (for some reason) prides itself on moving snow so well that there’s no reason to ever have a snow day.

Um. What?

Let’s even put aside the obvious fact that big snow storms or large amounts of black ice are dangerous and potentially life-threatening, especially when you have students driving themselves and their friends to school. There’s another big reason that Snow Days are crucial: Mental Health.

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