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Some weeks ago, I was driving late at night, and found that I was starting to yawn. I had to put gasoline in the car anyway, so I took the next off-ramp and stopped at a convenience store/gas station in order to fill up the car.

The station is located at the mouth of a canyon, and as I filled the car, I felt the cool breeze come out of the canyon into the valley. Coupled with a little bit of a walk, the breeze invigorated me, and when I returned to the car, I was wide awake. I was so wide awake, in fact, that after I got to my destination, I had a difficult time going to sleep. The breeze had refreshed me, and in the process, had invigorated me, even though it was the middle of the night.

Obviously, there is no substitute for a good night's sleep in my case, but it goes to illustrate how when we hit those seemingly-inevitable lulls in our life, we can regain our energy by a bit of "re-freshening," choosing an activity or new challenge that will wake up our lives, just as much as the canyon air reinvigorated me that evening.

Some parts of our lives may be hair-raising, nail-biting twists and turns down life's highway, but much of most lives is the same straight, rarely-changing stretch of road that we've seen already in the rear-view mirror. It's like driving through much of the midwest -- the roads run straight sometimes for hundreds of miles, with nary a hill or a turn.

The big problem with the straight road -- or in this case, the unchanging life -- is that it tends to lull us to sleep. We never change and never grow because there is no reason to. We may travel a lot of distance, but half of it is drowsing at the wheel.

But fortunately, we can choose to create times of refreshment in our lives -- we can choose to let in those breezes that will invigorate our thinking and our experiences on life's highway.

Let me say this about my list: We can achieve all of these things without moving across the country, getting a new job, finding a new spouse, or buying a red convertible. How? We can speed up our experiences by reading about the experiences other people have had. For example, I'm currently back reading Charles Dickens' books. I have a Kindle, as well as the Kindle software from Amazon.com, and Dickens' books cost nothing to me to read on the Kindle. His characters were so well drawn, and so fleshed out in his books that I can gain a great deal of understanding merely by applying the lessons I run across in those volumes. I have learned to apply those lessons in my life, and gain and grow from the lessons I learn -- and as a result, each new book helps me gain more understanding of the world around me, without having to spend years living those experiences out.

I can challenge myself in many ways -- physical or emotional challenges at home, technical or leadership challenges at work. I can gain new education through programs such as Lynda.com, put that experience into play in my life and at work; I can set goals for myself, work on individual areas such as financial strength or leadership training, or I can choose to accept challenges in new and undiscovered areas -- pottery or painting or photography.

In all of these things, one element becomes paramount: I must choose to use these experiences, whether borrowed from others or experienced personally, as a chance to "re-freshen" myself, which although it is poor English is what I'm trying to say, and somewhat free from the stereotypes we've placed on the words "refresh" or "recreate."

Copyright, 2010, by Daryl R. Gibson. All rights reserved. Permission is hereby granted for the non-commercial redistribution of this document as long as it remains intact with this copyright and all other lines. This license does not extend to the use of this material in a compilation, whether for profit or non-profit use. Join us at http://www.Weekdaywisdom.com.