We like to think that someday, things will be slower, more peaceful. That we’ll get a break. That after the holidays, after this busy season, then we’ll be able to get serious–about that thing we needed to think about, about that exercise we wanted to start doing, about taking that vacation. Once I get away from the city, from the office, then I can relax, we tell ourselves.

It’s never going to happen. You are fooling yourself. You are fooling yourself as people have always fooled themselves.

“The deified Augustus,” Seneca writes in On the Shortness of Life (a must read!), “to whom the gods granted more than to anyone else, never ceased to pray for rest and to seek a respite from public affairs. Everything he said always reverted to this theme—his hope for leisure. He used to beguile his labors with this consolation, sweet though false, that one day he would live to please himself.”

Marcus Aurelius, harried as he was by the affairs of state, tried to stop himself from fantasizing about someday when it would all be over. Instead, he wrote in Meditations, that the only break he was going to get–the only real peace–had to come from the inside. It wasn’t going to be a beautiful seaside resort or a few weeks in the country that was going to give him peace, it had to come from the inside.

Circumstances are never going to give you what you need. You’re going to have to take them. No one is going to give you time to study philosophy, you have to take it. You have to make the time. Externals are never going to restore what is essentially an internal issue. You need that break now…and you must get it by stepping away, not literally but figuratively.

Stop fooling yourself. Stop expecting someone or someplace to restore you. The only person who can only do it is you. And the right time for it is not later, but now.