Breaks in general, be they 5-minute Pomodoro intervals or semester breaks, should be opportunities to hit pause and break free from the hustle. They offer time to slow down and unwind, reflect or not think at all. They are chances to step back and indulge in that eminently French sentiment, la joie de vivre – the joy of living. Staying on top of trends and keeping up with Linkedin updates can be exhausting, so here is a carefully curated list of recommendations that will help you relish your well-deserved break.
First on the list is a self-help book. Unlike the long lists of trendy books you find online, Into The Magic Shop by James Doty is a page-turner. It offers useful advice interwoven with enthralling stories. With its light-hearted storytelling and magical setting, it had me riveted. It divulges the mysteries of the brain alongside the secrets of the heart, told by a neurologist himself in the simplest of ways – James Doty’s Into The Magic Shop is a book that will comfort your mind and assuage your worries. It is part memoir, part science, and part inspiration, all bound together by the magic that brewed in a little shop years ago, when James Doty – today a clinical professor of neurosurgery at Stanford University and founder and director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education – met Ruth. Doty narrates his encounter with Ruth, the woman in the “Magic Shop” who taught meditation and visualization techniques to the little boy who grappled with the burden of trauma and suffering. We follow the ten-year old boy on his road to learning tricks bordering on magic, but as he grows older in the narrative, and plunges into the field of neuroscience, we realize that what he has mastered is guided meditation and what he has learnt is the concept of neuroplasticity.
“Things don’t always happen the way we think they will, but I’ve learned that they happen exactly the way they’re supposed to happen.”
While my first recommendation offers lessons in mastering meditation and relaxing your mind, my second recommendation is a movie that will invoke an appreciation for the little things in life. Almost like a live-action version of a Ghibli movie, its calming music and exquisite shots of nature speak to the nostalgia that grips everyone occasionally. The constant urge to go home, and how you bury it and try to move forward, allowing that unspoken feeling to linger as a lump in the throat – it is this yearning that Yim Soon-rye’s The Little Forest (2018) addresses. Approach the movie with an open heart and it feels like a stroll in the countryside, a return home. It serves as a reminder that growing up does not necessarily mean going away or outgrowing the past. The movie, with its simple frames, manages to strike all the right sentimental notes. The main character flees the big city to seek refuge in her hometown, where she finds sanctuary, cooking her own food, cultivating vegetables, and hanging out with her two friends. With its close shots of food and the satisfactory sequences of preparing the meals, it is a celebration of culinary delights, nature, and all things rustic. It is a movie that resonates like poetry, all about finding joy in the little things and reminding you to slow down and think about the people most important to you.
This brings me to my third recommendation for the season – the song Metamorphosis by Infinity Song, an indie band of four siblings from Detroit. It is both the title and opening track of their third album – the perfect choice, as it sets the tone for the entire record. The pared back instrumentation combined with the angelic vocals and the simple lyrics walk us through what exactly a metamorphosis is. The guitar artfully maneuvers into a tonal transition towards the end. The beginning of the song captures the sense of not liking yourself enough when you wake up in the morning. It complains of a niggling self-doubt, the nagging question of “What am I doing in life?” that tricks you into second-guessing everything you have been doing. It packs quite the punch when you hear them sing, “Can I be someone else?”
As the song progresses, the guitar strums and the harmonious vocals lead the listener to an epiphany. The song undergoes a metamorphosis of its own, and in the end, you feel as if you have grown along with it. It is a musical reminder to hit pause, and pat yourself on the back for the long way you have come.
“You couldn’t see a way through it,
But look at all the things you did –
Look at your metamorphosis.”
Fourth on the list is Patricia Lockwood’s No One is Talking About This. The book very accurately captures the experience of being online 24×7 – an exhausting exercise. It opens your eyes to the draining loop of being constantly aware and bombarded by information. In the first half of the book, the protagonist is chained to the glowing box that is a smartphone. The paragraphs read like feeds and twitter threads, capturing the essence of how it feels to live online. Unlike other books and movies that preach about the perils of the internet, Lockwood does not moralize, but helps you understand how screens lulling you to sleep and kickstarting your mornings renders the constant feeling of burnout as the new normal.
The last item on the list is Ocean Vuong’s fictional debut, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Vuong artfully interweaves themes of nationality, gender, war and race through his lyrical writing. The whole book is structured as a letter he writes to his illiterate mother. Every page tells a bittersweet tale of a fractured family and a fractured self. It steals your breath with its sensitive treatment of the burden of trauma, laden with memories that break your heart and warm your soul at the same time. Vuong’s writing makes you grieve with the characters; it breaks your heart and mends it with poetry.
“Is that what art is? To be touched thinking what we feel is ours when, in the end, it was someone else, in longing, who finds us?”
These recommendations should help you through your break, a gentle reminder to help you find the balance between il dolce far niente (the sweetness of doing nothing) and the rat race – that place somewhere in between, where it is quiet enough to hear yourself and bright enough to see the world.
