On "taking a break"

Sometimes the leaders of marathon Zoom meetings will say something like, "Okay, we've been working for three and a half hours now.  We should take a break.  Everybody, get a cup of coffee, use the washroom, check up on your email, return calls.  It's 11:26 now, so, let's get started again at.... how about 11:30?"

Sure enough everyone is back at 11:30, having "taken a break."  

Pretty much I do this to myself, too.  During my workday, I "give myself a break" between onerous work tasks by checking social media, returning  emails, walking a lap around the building.  But the "breaks" are things.  And things that could be great -- walks -- end up being a thing to get done.  

I'm thinking of Andy Goldsworthy (been watching Leaning into the Wind documentary on Amazon Prime) and hearing about how he takes hours contemplating things, just being patiently in nature, or waiting for the rain clouds to produce so he can do a "rain shadow," etc.

I'm also thinking of Hedda Sterne:

Now that I am so old and incapacitated, I don’t do anything with great enthusiasm. You know, thinking, dreaming, musing, become essential occupations. I am watching my life. As if I’m not quite in it, I watch it from the outside. Because after so many years of working unceasingly, and enthusiastically, being idle is a tremendous effort of concentration and adjustment. The luck is that there is less energy. That’s a compensation. It makes it easier. Just sitting. I saw peasants in Romania, you know, on Sunday, when they get up all summer at 4 and work incessantly until noon, let’s say. And Sunday they just sit, and their resting is so active like an activity, resting. It’s a beauty to behold, you know. It’s not just doing nothing. It’s being and existing in a certain way. In a way old age is a little bit like that. It has its beauties.

It makes me think -- there must be another way to "take a break" that is more like “being idle” or doing what those Romanians did and letting the busy world go by while we continue "being and existing."

After that, I can check email and use the bathroom.