Oh break rooms, remember those?
You know, the office lounging area in your building where the “Elixir of the Gods” was accessible by the touch of your hand (coffee machine) and your coworkers would occasionally pop by to blow off steam and chit-chat about meaningless nonsense? Yeah, I remember them. Or well I remember my office kitchen, which was essentially dubbed our unofficial break room where I’d snag a handful of cashews and chat with a miscellaneous coworker who happened to be grabbing their fourth cup of coffee.
I remember when I was fifteen working at Sonic and it being mandatory for us to take at least a fifteen minute break every so often when we had a long shift.
(Now quick! Picture this: an incredibly clumsy teenage Hayley in a bright green Sonic polo and visor speeding down the parking stalls, roller skates on, a red tray full of food in one hand, and a blast in the other. The amount of times I sped over a pebble that sent me superman diving into the pavement was unreal. The scars on my knees? Even more impressive.)
On the slow days it wasn’t necessary, but on the crazy ones… wow, it was needed.
We’d get hit by the early morning Saturday rush of car fanatics coming from Cars & Coffee at our local theater parking lot asking for either two giant bags of ice or four coffees to-go, STAT.
Next we’d have the mid-day lunch run, which could start as early as eleven AM, where parents would stop in for a quick lunch on their way to drop off a quite large group of children to camp what’s it called for who knows what. They’d rattle off their long list of orders requesting iced cherry limeade after cherry limeade, four footlong hotdogs with chili AND cheese, two double cheeseburgers, three orders of tater tots, and as many ice cream blasts as I could balance on my tray. They’d grab their loot, say “thank you”, and close their window quickly speeding away leaving just in time for another car to slide in their space and hit the button before I even had a chance to make it back inside.
This would last about two hours, then we’d get a quick window to clean the fountain machine and prepare for Happy Hour…
Oh Happy Hour. The dreaded time of day for any Sonic employee. The period of two pm to four pm where everyone sprints to pick up their half priced drinks and shushes. It would be well over ninety degrees outside, and we’d be whipping down the pavement to deliver an obscene amount of Rt 44 drinks as if our lives depended on it.
And to be completely honest, my tips sure did. Back when I worked as a Carhop, I only made a little over two dollars an hour. The rest of my pay was determined by tips, something that only about half my customers were actually aware of. So, my fellow Carhops and I would bust our asses being as quick and efficient as possible to snag as many orders as we could in the off chance that someone might have the cash to tip us.
Once the rush subsided, we’d all take turns taking that fifteen minute break, or clock out for the end of our shift - whichever came first.
But that break was sacred. Some coworkers would take their much desired smoke breaks out back, others would chow down on their employee-discounted lunch, and the rest would take a good chunk of their break time standing in the freezer to cool down.
Those few brief moments of serenity where you could give your brain a little recess.
As an adult, our breaks are a bit more like the coffee run I described at the beginning of this post. We finish up that email or meeting, and sneak off to the kitchen to grab that glorious handful of cashews.
Now, what I really want to talk about though is something a bit larger than taking your well deserved break in the middle of the day. I’d like to spend some time talking about giving yourself a break when it comes to your life goals.
We spend more than half of our lives asleep, where during some of those nights we concoct and reveal some of our desires and wants that we crave to live out during the day.
You and I, we yearn for that thing that becomes our thing. Whether it be becoming a perfect parent, a successful artist, a life-changing teacher, a worldly philanthropist, or even an award winning horror film screenplay writer. Some of us may not even know exactly what it is that we’re made for, but we look for it.
And we become impatient with ourselves.
We get mad at ourselves.
Sometimes we get so frustrated that we haven’t figured out how to either find that thing or why we haven’t become successful yet that we forget that things take time.
We instead dwell over why it’s taking SO much time. Why haven’t I become an award winning pianist yet? Why am I not yet living in my penthouse suite? When? Why is it taking so long?
We put the pressure of time on ourselves. We set imaginary timelines in our head to land that thing by the end of the month, year, or by the time we’re twenty-five, fourty, or more.
The word ‘time’ has an odd sense of pressure surrounding the word.
Tell me, why is it that we put so much pressure on ourselves to obtain a certain amount of prestige or status by a certain ‘time’ in our lives?
We spend the majority of our lives setting goals. Goals about ourselves. Goals about our relationships. Goals about our work life. Goals for our future. Goals about… I could go on, and on…
But, it’s interesting to think about the time frame in which we set for ourselves.
On a realistic scale, it’s not a bad thing. Tangible goals, with time expectations, are good. They’re healthy. They give us things to look forward to, to work towards.
What’s not healthy, is setting an unrealistic time frame around an expectation you have for yourself that… quite frankly doesn’t need a time frame.
So, when it comes to these “goals” we set for ourselves that don’t necessarily need concrete “time frames,” what do we do about them? And, why do we do that to ourselves? Why can’t we just give ourselves a break?
Is it pride? Is it a sense of accomplishment that we set for ourselves? Is it pressure from our environmental factors? Is it a fantasy goal that we set for ourselves that is based on an expectation?
It’s because we want more. We feel that we need more. We deserve more. And truthfully, everyone does. We all do.
It’s ingrained in our heads from a young age that we can be absolutely anything we want to be. Take the American Dream for example: the ideal by which equality of opportunity is available to any American, allowing the highest aspirations and goals to be achieved.
It’s the fact that things are achievable as long as you put your mind to it.
(Please note that I’m aware of how privilege affects these things, and by no means am I discounting this. It’s very important to understand that even today there are still privileges of class, gender and race that have unfortunate societal advantages, which are unfair and wrong).
And we put the pressure on.
Realistically, at the same time, we’re all a bit vain. We have a certain expectation that we set for ourselves. I’ll be the first one to admit that in the past I’ve set very unrealistic goals for myself, expected myself to meet them by a certain timeframe, and failed famously.
What should be a factor is your effort and desire. Not the time frame.
If I want to be successful, I should do things that contribute to that. If I want to be authentic to what I want to actually accomplish, I should quit making time a factor in this goal mindset that I have. I should give myself a break and the time to actually achieve it.
The reality is, things don’t actually happen overnight. So being impatient with your goals and setting those unrealistic time expectations for lofty sights end up backfiring on us.
We get burnt out. We get tired. Impatient.
Because we didn’t give ourselves a break. And by break, I hope you’ve picked up on the fact that I’m not actually referring to the literal act of taking a break. Although, those do help.
Give yourself the grace and time to set smaller goals to make that bigger dream a reality. No matter what it might be. Those big goals could be that large family you’ve always strived for, or finally buying that house on the beach. But the smaller ones are the things that get you there.
The thing is, these graceful goals don’t all have to be baby steps, just small valuable ones. Ones that make you feel proud that you tried something, worked hard on it, and BAM a tiny little win appeared. Or hell, a tiny little fail happened, and you learned something.
But all and all, the one thing that I’ve learned from my Carhop days to my professional career in advertising, is that the best way for me, myself, to make the most out of my dreams and aspirations is to give myself a break. To always work hard, but most of all be patient. To give myself grace with those dreams. They’ll come, and there is only so much I can control. And with the control that I have, I’m going to give myself the grace of time to focus and achieve them one day.
So I challenge you to maybe give yourself the grace of time as well, rather than the burden of time as a deadline hanging over your head.
I sure know that I’m working on it.
Oh, and just as a friendly reminder, you should really take advantage of your vacation days. Your sanity needs it.
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