What makes for a successful vacation? Is it spending the maximum amount of time with your family? Is it recharging your batteries? Is it resting your weary soul? Is it taking the time to do the things you did not have time for while you were working? Firstly, it is important to add that these kind of decisions and these kind of evaluations are fairly rare, in the world, and certainly in our history. I simply cannot imagine that such questions resonated with my grandparents or their parents. Life was too hard, resources too scarce, the demands too great, for them to ponder where they would take their vacation.
You might add that families today are also struggling. This is true but it has not stopped people from taking vacations. I recall a conversation I shared with another parent, on my daughter’s first day of school. The father had recently been laid off, the mother worked part-time, they had a large mortgage as they put little money down when they purchased the home. But this family of three were heading for Florida in the winter. “It’s what we do in this country”, the mother told me.
But given that we all do need some time away from work, some time spent exclusively with our families, and some time investing in activities we would not normally experience, what do we do, where do we go and how do we evaluate these decisions? I think the place to start is Creation. I would never, ever, have said that when I was younger but looking back I see things I missed at that time. I did not want to go to our cottage in Petpeswick, on the Eastern shore, there was no baseball game, no tennis match, and no golf game, just a bunch of granite rocks, a beach, and a small cottage. Looking back I see the virtue in the time spent aware of the sky and the water and the land. I see that time with my brothers and my parents and grandparents were special. Life slowed down, we talked more, we listened better, and we felt keenly connected to everything around us.
I don’t think it was a matter of how much time we spent there, or what we did or what we didn’t do. We did not lay on a beach, we did not spend all our time reading on the deck, and we certainly did not visit tourist places around us. Instead we walked the beaches looking for sand dollars, we played “stealing bases” (where two people throw the ball back and forth, each next to a base, while two people attempt to race back and forth without being tagged out), we helped our grandmother weed her garden, and we walked and talked our way throughout the area (we were 1 km from Martinique Beach).
Kim, Lucy and I have just returned from a magical place called White Point Lodge. We don’t do much there, Lucy and Kim go swimming while I walk our dog. We mostly sit outside and read and talk and listen to the ocean crashing against the beach, the rocks. I think it is the sound of the waves that I will keep in my mind throughout the rest of the year. All of the conversations, all of the reading, all of the walking, all of the good meals, centered on the sounds of the waves. In the morning I would walk Nova and feel the cool, clear air, then Kim and I would go for our breakfast, the coffee was refreshing, then back to the cottage to read and talk and occasionally nap, and then more walking the dog, etc… It all goes back to Creation. It is what makes our vacations memorable and worthwhile.