I decided to take a few days off work last week. Just to relax, get my mind off projects and to stay away from Excel files for a while. Well, that later didn’t really happen, but I kinda knew that going in. But hey, I just can’t keep my hands off Big E for long.

But seriously. With so much time on my hands I decided to take out my sketchbook, sharpen my pencils and see if I felt inspired to sketch something. I was flipping through my book, thinking about possible subjects and I suddenly felt like drawing goats. And this really surprised me, because I’ve never drawn animals before. The fact that I’ve been eating goat cheese for breakfast, lunch and dinner lately might have something to do with it? Possibly.

I propped myself up in our bed, grabbed my pencils and away I went. And it felt so good to just concentrate on one single thing. An image of a goat in a field. Then on just one single horn. Then the curve of that horn. A tuft of hair. A hair strand. One tiny detail at a time. No rush.

I get that a woman’s prefrontal cortex is pretty advanced and that that might have a thing or two to do with why we are good at multi-tasking. I might be good at it, but it is exhausting! On most workdays I feel like I am run down, better yet, run over by a bulldozer. And the worst thing is, on most days I don’t even realize it until I collapse into bed at night.

Slowing down my brain, focusing on one single thing only felt like a massage in a spa. It hurts like the dickens at first, like someone’s poking you with a red hot iron rod. Poking you where you never even knew you had muscles. And then when you think you cannot take it any longer that feeling goes away and is replaced with this bliss, this soft hum of muscular joy. And that is what it felt like for my brain. Sketching away carelessly, shutting out everything else, becoming mindful was the best brain massage I ever had!

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