Living Life Fully’s Daily Pick-Me-Up

I’m getting a pretty good education right now about the value of vacations. We’re in Germany now, in a small town in the Alps, in a Guesthouse where there’s no Internet access at all. This keeps me from checking email, checking website statistics, and all that other stuff that’s part of my “daily” life. I’m loving it. If I had an Internet connection, I know that I’d feel obligated to be checking things and adding things, working as much as I could while on vacation. But that’s not what vacations are for, is it? Vacations are for taking a break, short or long, but definitely leaving behind the things that keep me busy all the time. Sometimes, though, it’s difficult to leave things behind. We want to continue producing, continue working, continue with the things that keep us busy during our work days.

Why do we feel that not doing anything productive is “wrong”? Why is it so difficult for us to relax and not get something “done”? Why do we keep our cell phones on, not daring to cut contact with the workplace or the other people with whom we share our lives at home?

After all, isn’t one of the purposes of taking a vacation to break contact with our normal daily lives? Isn’t one of the goals of traveling to see new things and to focus strongly on them, giving them our full attention while we see them? Don’t we lose that ability as soon as we pull our daily life into the new world we’re supposed to be exploring while on vacation? Right now I’m writing this entry, but I see it more as an entry in a journal than as work. I’m trying to keep as much of the positive in the vacation, and keep out the negative. And sometimes I have the tendency to allow some of the negative stuff in. I don’t want to do that.

A vacation doesn’t have to be in a different country or somewhere we’ve never been. A vacation can be at home, as long as we try to keep the daily stuff out of our vacation days. We choose what we let into our lives, on a daily, even momentary basis. We choose the obligations we make or don’t make, we choose the people we talk to or not, we choose whether we’re on vacation or whether we’re just doing the same old stuff in a different place. New stuff in a new place makes for a great vacation, but new stuff in an old place also can provide us with the rest and relaxation that we so dearly need if we’re going to get the rest that we need from our routines. So I want to enjoy the Alps, focusing on them and enjoying them. That’s the only way that I’m going to make this vacation worthwhile.