We’re in the down elevator. Look out the window and there’s summer, visibly diminishing with each earlier sunset. If you’re lucky, you might get out of your home and your head, take some time off and away. Upon return, you might be blessed (or cursed?), as I was recently, with that post-vacation clarity, whereby the excesses of one’s everyday life seem gaudy, nearly intolerable.
It’s good to be home, sure, but home is also absurd. Home, with its black-hole coat closet and dust-covered knickknacks and so very many condiments, is too much. A week spent living out of a suitcase and the concept of owning more than one sweatshirt seems silly. I keep thinking about the wise friend who told me that everything you buy makes everything you own less valuable.
It’s not the stuff itself — having enough stuff is a privilege — but the complications that accompany the stuff. You spend time in a new environment, on a different schedule, maybe eating different things, trying on other ways of living. Back home, you question things. Why do we always eat the same thing for dinner? Why don’t we have the same curiosity about the town where we live as we did about the town where we spent a few days? Why are we hanging on to the cords and cables from every electronic device that ever crossed our threshold?
This change in perspective, I think, more than even the rest and relaxation, is the most transformative possibility of vacation. You get to shed that life’s worth of accumulated mental freight for a short period, and it feels freeing. You return determined to maintain some of that lightness.
Even if you’re not taking a vacation this month, there’s nothing stopping you from questioning the way you’re doing things. A day trip, perhaps, or a long walk. What’s weighing you down? What feels sclerotic or overdetermined or just too much? Sometimes the problem isn’t something that announces itself as troubling, but a garage that’s too messy, a Saturday routine…
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