On Vacations and Being

I find that when I'm on vacation, I don't feel the need to do a lot of things or cram my days full of activity. That's what my normal life is like. I prefer to spend my vacation days reading, writing, observing, meditating. Slowing down. Getting back in touch with me. Which to me sounds like what the "work" of vacation ought to be about, and yet I am more often than not made to feel guilty for this. "What? You didn't do X? You didn't go to Y? You sat in your hotel room or apartment or friend's apartment or a coffee shop or park or edge of a river or lake or sitting by a fire reading and lollygagging? You didn't do a tourist stop, you just went to a *local* restaurant?"

Apparently, vacation is supposed to be filled to the brim with entertainments and excitement and shopping for things I don't actually need and enduring an onslaught of outside stimuli in order to have "vacated" properly. It's not enough to have taken a walk, I should have gone hiking; preferably a power hike, with special boots and moisture-wicking clothing from REI. Or I shouldn't have taken a slow kayak on the lake so as not to disturb the loons, I should have done as many laps as possible or taken the kayak to that cool festival three lakes over or used the motorboat for maximum speed and sound decibels... or at the minimum, I should only be in the hotel/guest-house long enough to sleep. Certainly not to read the newspaper. And I should never come back to the room before midnight.

Nah.

 "Did you even go anywhere?"

"Nope, stayed home." or "I did go somewhere - I got a hotel room there and barely left it except to eat and perhaps enjoy one or two diversions each day."

Anyway, I was just looking up quotes about peace. I knew Thich Nhat Hahn has many, so I was searching for quotes by him, and I came across this one which was the inspiration to post this note:

“In modern society most of us don't want to be in touch with ourselves; we want to be in touch with other things like religion, sports, politics, a book - we want to forget ourselves. Anytime we have leisure, we want to invite something else to enter us, opening ourselves to the television and telling the television to come and colonize us.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, Being Peace

I think of vacation as a time to decolonize and get back in touch with myself. We make enough bricks for pharaoh, as Brueggemann is wont to say, I don't need to make bricks while on vacation.

I've had a most pleasurable vacation so far - four days of reading (on my third book already), writing on my computer, writing letters to friends, reading the newspaper, drinking coffee, doing some laps in the pool, going out for meals and a few little trips, and always back before the sun goes down. Three of my suppers have been at the restaurant right next to the hotel so that I can walk there and back. And I took a book with me every time, just as I have for all my lunches in various places, and all my breakfasts in the hotel lobby.

And it's wonderful.