Justin Langer: Bruce Lee, Wayne Bennett are proof that taking a break means you’ll always be at your best

Three years ago in this column I wrote about my self-prescribed ‘hippie month’. I grow a beard, wear shoes as little as possible, and basically bring down the volume on my life. Back then, it was an April ritual timed to coincide with the end of the cricket season. People still ask me about my hippie month. This week I found myself listening to my own advice, not as a matter of routine and ritual, but rather as a personal reminder to get my s--t together. I have just come home from 12 weeks in London and India. On paper it’s a dream. Glamorous hotels, the biggest cricket tournament on the planet, packed stadiums, and a different city every four or five days. Truthfully, the competition and responsibility are amazing, and I feel lucky to be a part of it. But like many dreams, there is also the shadow. In this case, the perfect lifestyle to some is the problem and challenge for others. A different city every four or five days. On and off planes, in and out of another hotel room before I had learned where the light switches were. Hotels and cricket grounds, day in, day out. Meetings, training, play, repeat. By the time I landed back in glorious Perth — and not for the first time in my life — I was running on fumes. That’s how it felt anyway. I was cooked. So, when an invitation came to head down to Dunsborough this week for a rest, the idea sounded idyllic. Sea air, a change of scene, a fireplace, and complete isolation. What could be better? But then on Sunday night something inside me put its hand up. I didn’t need another bed, another commute, another travel bag. What I needed was to sleep in my own bed, the same bed, for at least a week. To walk the dogs. To do the small things I love, in the one place, without having a suitcase open on the floor. What I needed, I realised, was to go back to my hippie month. In essence the philosophy behind the hippie month is to slow everything down. It is a conscious decision. The concept of beard and barefoot simply helps draw a simple picture of how I feel in this time. Instead of rushing from meeting to meeting, I did a bit of gardening, ate dinner at home, read every night, caught up with my friends, visited the Barbaro Brother Butchers in my old stomping ground of Greenwood and played a round of golf with my Dad. Part of my nightly ritual, in my own bed, with Teddy the dog lying next to me, was re-reading my favourite and most-read book, Joe Hyams’ Zen in the Martial Arts. The pages are now tattered and torn because I have read it more times than I can count, but every time it hands me a sliver of wisdom gold. This time it was a chapter about a man named Bronislaw Kaper, a sabre champion of the time, who first led Hyams to the martial arts. Hyams rang him to arrange lunch and Bronny declined. “Sorry,” he said. “But this is my day for doing nothing.” When Hyams protested that lunch was hardly doing something, Bronny laughed and explained that ‘doing nothing’ was itself an activity, an exercise. Bronny compared doing nothing to a pause in music. “A pause is not a lack of music,” he said. “It is an integral part of the composition.” As Claude Debussy has said, ‘Music’ is the space between the notes.” Bruce Lee, who Hyams trained with, says much the same thing in the book, only in the language of combat. Most martial artists, he explains, attack with the force of a storm and never stop to observe the effect of what they are doing. “When I attack,” Bruce says, “I always try to pause, stop action to study my opponent and his reactions, before going into action again.” He called it one of his secrets. He was never locked into a routine, and never let the bout, or life, dictate to him. My public speaking mentor Earl Reeve taught me that the great speakers are those who have mastered the pause. Earl once told me: “The moment you have the courage to turn your back to the crowd, wait, turn back, and then deliver the punchline, you know you have made it as a speaker.” The space between the notes. The pause. The breath. The break. In essence, these are the fundamentals behind the hippie month philosophy. The IPL season I have just lived through had no space between the notes at all. It was one long unbroken run of activity, and I was the one who took the pauses out. Big mistake. Last season in India I quietly packed my putter and a pitching wedge into my luggage. Whenever the schedule allowed, I would find a strip of carpet down a hotel hallway or any patch of grass I could find and chip and putt for half an hour. It was nothing serious, but it was my pause. It was the space between the notes, and it kept me relaxed and focused for my work. This season I talked myself out of it. I convinced myself that the more professional thing, the disciplined thing, was to leave the clubs at home, stay focused, and do everything ‘right’. So I left them behind. Big mistake. By the end of the campaign, we had not only had a poor season on the points table, but we were all completely drained. Every one of us. We all worked so hard, but we hadn’t planned our pauses right. The lesson I keep relearning, and I suspect anyone in business or any kind of demanding job will recognise, is this: Unless you schedule your pauses, and commit to your mini hippie breaks, the work simply expands to fill every gap, until one Sunday night you may discover you are at bursting point. Work, work, work is not the only answer. Early in my coaching days the great rugby league coach Wayne Bennett gave me the best advice I ever received on this. “Take off one day a week,” he said. “And by a day off I mean a complete day off.” He would head to the family farm with his son, switch off his phone, and step off the treadmill entirely. He told me he couldn’t offer me any more meaningful advice. Over time I have realised the master coach was absolutely right. Most of us can’t disappear for a month. I didn’t disappear this week. But I did take a breath. Sometimes you must pause, assess, adjust, and then move. Hyams puts the whole idea in one beautiful sentence near the end of one of his chapters: “I had discovered that doing nothing can sometimes be more important than doing something.” I wish I had read that sentence before I decided to leave my golf clubs at home. A hippie month, a hippie week, a single switched-off day — even half an hour chipping a golf ball down a hotel corridor — can make the world of difference. As Joe Hyams’ great friend Bronislaw Kaper knew, the pause is not a lack of the music. It is part of the composition.