It cost not a red cent for me to reconnect with the lush and mesmerizing work of Claude Monet at the Gagosian Gallery in New York City this week. Now there’s a juxtaposition of oil and water that didn’t make my stomach turn.

Quite the contrary.

This is one of those simple luxuries I learned about while unemployed back in 2002. I realized that regardless of what was troubling me financially or emotionally, an outing that stimulated my senses so gently could be the perfect medicine for what ailed me. And it didn’t require dipping into my pocketbook.

I was always a firm believer in hitting the pavement, tracking leads and networking like crazy when seeking work, but I am also – now – a firm believer in a respite from that grind. A soothed soul can come across really well in a job interview, make openness to new things possible and even appealing, and keep our physical selves in balance as well. Would you rather hire the frazzled individual or the relaxed one?

That’s why I never understood why we get snarky about how many days off our presidents take. Please, by all means, take a breather on the links or the ranch while you’re making decisions that will affect an entire nation and the planet. No sense imploding from the stress and making us all pay for it.

While there was nothing ailing or stressing me this week, I set out to feed my soul nonetheless. Years ago I was a bit obsessed with Monet. A casual art fan, I was all about the pretty, the pastel, the serene vibe. My home looked like a shrine to the artist. Then it started to feel somehow unsophisticated to dig the water lilies. Wasn’t art supposed to be gritty and edgy?

Slowly I became more open to bawdy, shocking, bold pieces. When I visited Paris, I made a beeline for Manet’s Olympia – depicting a lounging, naked prostitute – at the Musee D’Orsay my very first day. Pretty took a backseat.

But this week, with the Monet exhibit – called Late Work -- coming to an end, my friend and I, egged on by some terrific reviews, took it in.

“I loved seeing how he took one scene and ‘played’ with it, changing it around, pushing his artistic envelope,” my friend, Kathi Carlson, said. “It motivates me to be fearless with my own amateur painting attempts.”

It was also fascinating for me to see the different ways he had of presenting or seeing the same scene from his garden in Giverny and to realize this experience, too, is sophisticated. Holland Cotter’s review in The New York Times eloquently gets to the core of what else Monet’s late work evokes for the viewer.

“Once Monet’s art was all about light; now it seems to be about darkness, or light escaping from darkness,” Cotter writes. “It was about the garden at night. Whoever said a garden was necessarily a benign environment? It’s a Darwinian battleground, rife with silent violence as plants compete for space, light, moisture, nutriment. It’s a place of entanglements and strangulations, of poisonous, itch-inducing stabbing things. And of inexhaustible beauties.

“The fact is that everything of essential importance that happens in the world happens in miniature in a garden in some form. To know this is to be absorbed into the botanical drama. Monet was absorbed, and he tried to simulate that drama in art.”

Seeing this powerful artistic rendering of nature, I could not help but think of the ongoing oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico and all the ecosystem drama that has been violently disrupted. So many creatures that don’t know what hit them.

My soothing break was great while it lasted.

Nancy Colasurdo is a practicing life coach and freelance writer. Her Web site is www.nancola.com. Please direct all questions/comments to FOXGamePlan@gmail.com.