By the time I stopped by last week, the new peach stand on the Sag Harbor Road had been open for nearly a month. I had meant to check it out but had always felt rushed, zipping from one thing to another, unable to spare the few minutes it would take.
Looked at one way, this was strange, since I like peaches. But in the context of the way so many of us live our lives, not taking a break for something pleasurable is just business as usual. The benefits of time off the clock are obvious enough, but we don’t take the time even when it is offered. Too many times had I driven past Truxel Farm and thought, “I ought to stop if I had the time.”
An ambulance volunteer I once knew told me how she would scramble to get her things and out the door when a call came in. By contrast, her husband, also an E.M.T., would methodically pace himself. “Slow down,” he would tell her. “The accident has already happened.” Some people are better at this than others.
We are addicted to our preoccupations so much so that we are rarely unoccupied. Sure, we are eternally tied to our digital devices, but before that it was television, before that, probably radio. But in one significant way, I believe that hand-held tech is particularly insidious: our endless scrolling through Facebook, Instagram, TikTok. Much less so the app formerly known as Twitter, which no one I know outside of the news media has mentioned for months.
It is the vast complexity of these app worlds that makes them distinctly not qualified as breaks when we descend into them. We might be stretched out on a couch, but we are not relaxing. The constantly changing stream of images and gee-whiz ideas keep us jacked up until, exhausted, we finally close our eyes and dream of digital sheep (my apology to the late science fiction author Philip K. Dick).
Pulling weeds from the garden, looking at the ocean, stopping for a few peaches, those are the kind of breaks we all need.