I’m Never Coming Back from Vacation
My vacations are about recovery. Recovery of sleep. Recovery of the sun. Recovery of relaxation. Recovery of time. Recovery of cooking. Recovery of supressed passions.
This vacation was about novels. I used to be passionate about novels before graduate school. That’s when novels became work. Hard work, dense work, work filled with theory and essays and turning up the heat on the art until meaning boiled over and dampened out the flame that kindled it. We can dig too deep, I suppose, and destroy our own foundations by doing what we love too much and too hard.
This vacation I finished one novel, Pontoon by Garrison Keilor, and started another The Maytrees by Annie Dillard. I read for fun. Fun! That was nice.
Another passion is music. I listened to music. Not while driving. Not while reading. Not while cooking. Not while writing. Just music. I think I had turned everything into a soundtrack. MP3s will do that. There is too much music now. It’s too easy. It becomes a soundtrack.
So I read novels and listened to music. Sometimes at the same time. But I did most of it separately. And I remembered what it used to be like to enjoy this stuff.
And the goal is now to retain what was so passion-filled on vacation. Let me rephrase: it’s high time to make our vacations the new normal. That phrase the new normal has been thrown around a lot lately as talking heads debate how much materialism Americans will give up in the new economy.
My new normal is going to be vacations. We often think of vacations as unrealistic life, but that’s the world tricking us into the duldrums of mere existences. We are called to abundance, not existence. We are supposed to always be on vacation, not in "normal" life. Normal life isn’t normal. Vacations are the norm.
Storing up stuff is quiet useless. Use it now. Treat everything as if it is freshly picked from the garden and will soon rot. Go on vacation, even if you go to work each day. Work should not stop one from being in vacation mode, because vacations are normal. Not caring about gossip is normal. Not needing to watch TV or Twitter all the time is normal. We have things so backwards.
Tonight I am going to do a bunch of bills and e-mails and writing then sit in my backyard and read while watching bees and mosquitos buzz around my garden. And I’ll be on vacation.
You should go on vacation, too.
Here! Here!
Apparently my brain is too deep in vacation mode. That should be “hear! hear!”
Good thoughts here. Ironically, I formulate the problem in the exact opposite way:
I’ve often thought that we need to vacation because our normal lives are so miserable. Indeed, tourism is one of the biggest worldwide industries. And why does it exist? Because we destroy our local communities by way of indifference and apathy, and pay a lot of money to keep other places pristine (like resorts, etc.) and/or adventurous in order to escape from the dull realities we have given ourselves over to. This has lead me to want to give up vacationing altogether in favor of re-creating the normal in a more healthy and holistic way – and, of course, a more local way.
So I will not go on vacation as you urge me to do, rather I will try to never go on vacation…
I like it!
Reading for fun is one of my favorite things to do.
I’m currently reading “The Brother’s K”. Have you read it? I’m very much enjoying it…
One of the things I admire about people in New Jersey is that they don’t often feel they need to be in a different place. They go to the Jersey shore or go to New York City, both close locations. There isn’t a sense that relaxation cannot take place here; then again, most of the same people are working so much and driving so much that they often only have time to stick around locally, the great irony of the suburbs.
I have not read any of the Russian writers actually, save for the time I read Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground. Everyone who starts reading them loves them. I think that’s why I haven’t really started them actually, because I know if I read one 800 page book they’ll just be another one waiting for me.