Walk Away From Work — If Only To Enjoy & Recharge

I learned…..again….a very valuable lesson today.  I think it is a lesson we all have to relearn from time to time.

This is a lesson from Margaret Roach who had enjoyed an amazingly successful career, first as a New York Times editor, then at that pinnacle of power and connections, as editorial director of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia.  Margaret asks:” “Didn’t you ever want to get up from your desk one day and just walk away, not to go get a latte, but I mean walk away and not come back?”

And that is what she did.  She walked away to find peace and enjoy a quieter, more thoughtful life in her farmhouse in rural New York.  And she wrote a book about it And I Shall Have Some Peace There: Trading the Fast Lane for My Own Dirt Road.

If you’re like me…. caught up in the flurry of a hard charging career….taking a certain pride in the occasional 12 or 16 hour day, it is a stunning thought, to just walk away.  On the other hand, it does rather jolt you back to reality.  How many times have you said: “I’d like to ________ but I just don’t have time.”  You can fill in the blank:  travel, read just for fun, see friends more often.

Although I don’t see myself retreating to a Thoreau like setting such as Walden Pond just yet,  Margaret’s thoughts have definitely made me review my schedule, decide to ax those 16 to 18 hour days, however occasional they might be, and go ahead and book that trip to Spain and Italy my partner and I have been talking about for several years now.

As Margaret says, you have to make time for things you love or time may run out.  I’m not going to let that happen.  You might be inspired by Margaret’s video as well.

Image via Wikipedia

Walden Pond, Massachusetts Serentity at Walden Pond

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Since 1996, I have been both web publisher and author of AdvancingWomen.com, a site designed to help level the playing field for women and like-minded men in careers, business and particularly web biz, and now social media. I have provided career and business content to Fortune 500 companies like Citibank and Hearst, been published internationally by Cambridge University Press, by universities, military academies, medical and business societies, and financial organizations in Australia, India, and Saudi Arabia and translated into Mandarin Chinese, reaching a Chinese audience of over 2 million. I also served as financial news editor for Hearst’s MoneyMinded.com/Woman.com. I am a past member of the Board of Directors of National Association of Women Business Owners ( NAWBO-San Antonio); am active with the White House project, whose mission is to encourage women’s participation in politics and to place women in the pipeline to reach the highest offices in our land; also active with Win With Women, National Democratic Institute, Washington, D.C. to promote women in political leadership in 65 countries and various organizations supporting the increased use and funding of technology. I attended Wellesley College and graduated from Columbia University with a degree in writing. I come from a *very* entrepreneurial family and was, for many years, a serial entrepreneur myself always looking for a new horizon to explore. The latest horizon has been the dawning of the Internet, which I migrated to and set up tent ,shortly after Netscape came out with the browser in 1994. ( As those of you involved with the Internet know, in Net time, that is somewhat equivalent to when the dinosaurs were crawling out of the swamps. I have many interesting stories from those wild and woolly pioneer days.) For the past 13 years, I’ve been working on the Internet. I’m all about building community.