I can't switch off — even on holiday my mind is still at work.

Start where you're standing: you want the last link — happiness, the loose-shouldered, nowhere-else-to-be feeling the brochure promised. The verse says that link hangs off another: no peace, no happiness. And peace hangs off a third: without bhāvanā (भावना) — the settled, single-direction orientation of a mind that knows what it is for — there is no peace. And that belongs only to a mind that is yoked, gathered, harnessed. The word the verse actually uses is its opposite: ayukta (अयुक्त), the unyoked one.

That's the whole diagnosis. Happiness is the fourth link of a chain, and you have been trying to buy it at the wrong end. A flight can change your latitude. It cannot yoke your mind. So the scattering — dozens of open loops, each politely requesting a status update — simply travels in your hand luggage and unpacks itself beside the pool.

Be honest about what that laptop in the suitcase is: a signed agreement that the mind may keep every loop open. Each glance at the phone is not a small thing — it is the renewal of a contract. The Gita's very next verse supplies the image: one wandering sense the mind agrees to follow, and it carries away your judgment the way wind takes a boat on water. The gust doesn't need an hour. It needs one unguarded look at one subject line, and the afternoon is gone.

Notice that the verse never blames the work. It doesn't say the job must go, any more than Krishna told Arjuna to leave the battlefield. The problem it names is not employment; it is unyokedness — a mind that has been allowed to run to whatever calls it, for so long, that it no longer answers to you even on a beach. The office isn't following you around. The restlessness is yours; the office just rents it.

Before your next real break — or just this Saturday — close the loops on paper. Take twenty minutes and write down every open thing the mind is holding: the task, whose move it is, the date you'll touch it next. The mind stands guard over what it fears will be dropped; show it the ledger and it stands down. This is the buddhi (बुद्धि) — the deciding intellect — doing its actual job, deciding once, instead of reconsidering forever.

Then replace the hundred glances with one window. Not "I'll try not to check" — the mind treats a vague intention as an opening bid. A decision: fifteen minutes, once, after breakfast; outside that window the phone lives in the drawer. The first day this feels like withdrawal. By the third day something old and forgotten happens: a whole hour passes without the hum.

Last, give the mind ten minutes of daily practice at being in one place — a walk without headphones, a cup of tea drunk while doing absolutely nothing else, one page read slowly. Not because tea is sacred, but because a mind that is never asked to stay anywhere will not suddenly learn to stay on a holiday. Rest is not the absence of work. It is the presence of a gathered mind — and that is practised at a kitchen table long before it is enjoyed on a beach.