The Ten-Minute Break

I used to work the front desk at a spa/salon. It was a job where no one knew the thirty thousand things you were doing in that moment except the person next to you. Unless it was the thirty minutes before opening, or the hour after closing, two people staffed that desk.

We got to know each other’s thresholds. Holding tension in the shoulders. Holding tension in the voice. Pressing down on the desk with both hands and holding your breath.

And that’s when we’d say, “Take ten.”

And the tension-holder would look back and go “Are you sure?” Because she knows what happens when this particular front desk is run by one person and not two.

“Yes. Go. Take ten.”

And the tension holder would walk past the salon, through the waiting room with cucumber water and almonds, through the back room with the six washers and dryers, out the door.

For ten minutes she’d let herself breathe outside air and feel sun.

And it would keep her from pressing the desk with both hands without breathing for the rest of her shift.

I’ve been lucky to find a front desk buddy at every job I’ve been at since then. People whose thresholds I recognize, and who recognize mine. We won’t take ten-minute breaks on our own. But we will when we’re told to by our buddy.

This was a month where I needed a ten-minute break or two. I got so much done. But I would not have been able to do it without someone seeing the tension in my shoulders and saying “Go for a walk.” “I can’t,'“ I’d say. “I have too much to do.” “Yes you can,” they’d say. “Go.”

Photo attribution: Michal Klajban, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons