Poetry and Photography by Rhys Hughes
Almost everything
will work again if you unplug it
for a few minutes —
including you!
I passed that sign on the outside
wall of the ‘Relaxation Centre’
this morning
and I had to take a photo
to serve me as a future warning.
The message it conveys
has disturbed me
in so many ways, especially
logically. You see,
it seems to claim
that if you unplug yourself
(in other words stop working)
you will work again.
So if you stop working, you
will start working!
But I stop working when
I want to stop working,
not when I want to start working.
The ultimate result
of this message, if it is true,
is that we will be stuck
in an eternal loop of work.
What a nightmare!
The very notion hurts my brain.
I don’t want to work
forever. I don’t think it’s clever
to avoid holidays.
One of the perks of life
is that we have opportunities to
shirk stress and strife
by staying away from the office
and offering a kiss
goodbye to chores and labour.
In fact, I believe holidays to be
vastly superior
to toil and drudgery.
Even a budgerigar knows this
to be true. Who
doesn’t? Only the person who
made that sign.
Maybe they were drunk
on the wine of self-satisfaction
or thought they could
get a certain reaction that would
be useful to them
from intrigued passersby
but I question why they forgot
the simple equation:
we have earned the right to do
absolutely nothing
without expecting rejuvenation.
And now I am sitting in a canoe
next to you. We are
drifting down a stream and when
the stream joins the
river, and when the river reaches
the sea, together we
will paddle, you and me, to a new
land where work is
avoided as a matter of course. Call
it utopia if you like
or any other name. I only hope that
when it is our turn
to call it something, it will respond
with the smile of
a comfy paradise,
humming a lazy tune in our honour.
I don’t want to bother
with work: it irks me to think of the
trouble it perpetuates,
the ruthless facile way it decimates
sensitive minds. Our
canoe and every dream afloat in the
flimsy boat are more
true than management strategies and
meeting room agendas.
Almost everything
will work again if you unplug it
for a few minutes —
including you? No thanks.
I don’t intend to put it to the test.
My plan is to rest
for lifetimes, not minutes, on my
own serene terms.
Rhys Hughes has lived in many countries. He graduated as an engineer but currently works as a tutor of mathematics. Since his first book was published in 1995 he has had fifty other books published and his work has been translated into ten languages.
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