You’ve probably seen the commercial. A pretty young woman wakes up in her young person’s cheaply-decorated apartment bedroom. She smiles, stretches and leaps from the edge of the bed and in one effortless motion she pulls off an unsightly lighting fixture from the ceiling and reveals the stylish ceiling fan hidden underneath. She returns to the room, dressed as a bride, carried over the threshold by a handsome groom. She spins out of his arms, peeling off all the ugly old wallpaper and revealing the attractive yellow paint job underneath. In a graceful cascade of never-ending movement, they flash through their lives- dad lifts the young kids off a dingy, toy-strewn rug, mom pulls up the rug and, with the help of her now-teenage boys, rolls out a new carpet and serves them lemonade without missing a beat. Her gracefully aging husband comes down the stairs and joyfully dances as he pushes the kitchen wall back, opening up the space and revealing French doors.  The scene shifts and the much older couple are hosting a family gathering on the patio. The husband asks the wife to dance, evoking the courtship of their youth, and as they tenderly move around each other, their two grown sons dance around the perfect green lawn with wives and children of their own. The camera pulls back and the sun begins to set on a perfect American day as the Lowe’s logo appears on the screen along with the slogan “Never Stop Improving.”. Throughout it all, that song keeps playing- you know the one cause it sticks in your head like gum under a theatre seat (trust me, I’m an expert): “Don’t stop doing what you do” It’s a great commercial, right? Brilliant and inspiring and a total crock...

The point of Labor Day weekend has always flummoxed me. Why do we need a holiday weekend at the end of August? Presumably we’ve been taking our vacations sometime over this period, and enjoying those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer. Yet apparently we need a break after all of that, a break that completely robs the week we now find ourselves in of any momentum. In school, we’d often start classes the week before Labor Day, only to immediately go into a 3-day weekend, completely throwing off class schedules right when they should be getting started. I’m not against holidays, and certainly not against the labor movement that this most recent holiday commemorates (unions helped put food on my table throughout my childhood). But there does seem to be a prevailing notion in our society that encourages us to take breaks more often than we need them. Advertising constantly encourages give ourselves a break, or have a treat. Self-help books and novels encourage us to find ourselves on vacations—to escape from the stress of our busy days. But how busy are our days, really? Certainly there are those out there who work 60 hours and more a week, who struggle through multiple jobs to support family or maintain a decent quality of living. But those people probably aren’t taking breaks—they can’t afford to. For the rest of us who work closer to 40 hours (or less) we probably tend to give ourselves too many breaks. Ok, I give myself too many breaks. I’ve never found it difficult to stop working and take it easy. It’s getting going again that is the real difficulty. There is nothing I have found that is more addictive than complacency—it’s really the root of all continuing bad habits....