Why You Should Take a Vacation
I spent a week on the North Shore in April. (Photo credit: Rambling Traveler; licensed under the Creative Commons)
Blogging is blogging because it’s casual, relevant and frequent. As in, it happens regularly. As in, twice a week. Or once a week. Or several times a day.
Recently I’ve fallen short in the frequency department. Here’s how I fell off the wagon: a holiday weekend (July 4th) hit, followed by a day or two of vacation, followed by a busy time in the production schedule when I was back at work, followed up by a dismaying few days of underinspiration and general lack of interesting things to say (one could argue that this period is not yet over… ahem).
So today, with a little more time in my schedule, my natural instinct was to start feeling guilty about my lapse. But lately I’ve been working to fight my natural propensity for guilt, so I began to look for a positive perspective on my long stretch of silence — and I found it in the importance of vacations.
Now, granted, I was not vacating the office the whole time I was asleep in the blogosphere. But the holiday weekend did kick off my extended stretch, and summer is one of the classic vacation times. So what better time to think about the necessity of vacations.
In March, we ran a story on the critical importance of vacations — and how our culture doesn’t recognize or support the regular taking of them (read No-Vacation Nation here). In short, the story recounted how vacations are necessary not just for health and happiness, but also for success and productivity. Yet we Americans take far too few of them.
Another seminal point in the story is that when many of us DO take vacation, we take some work — maybe a laptop or our blackberry — with us. We don’t ever truly vacate from our duties and responsibilities.
We’re always connected — dizzyingly so — with our work, our to-do lists, our daily tasks, our online audience, be it comprised of one reader (Hi, Aunt!) or 100,000. We rarely, if ever, fully step out of our daily routines.
Yes, it’s in our cultural DNA to work round the clock — our country was built on the idea of hard work and ritual sacrifice. But it’s in the best interest of our health to take a break now and then. And not just by turning off the phone for an evening. We need to really disconnect, get away, take more than a long weekend. These longer breaks give us the opportunity both to reconnect with our true selves (who we are as human beings as opposed to human doings) as well as with family, health, dreams, goals, sleep, leisure, and joy.
I stumbled across a recent New York Times article on the exhaustion (sometimes deadly) of round the clock blogging — and, indeed, it would seem that, as the author Matt Richtel suggests, 24/7 blogging and continual connectivity is the 21st Century sweatshop. The digital dawn has made our lives easier in many respects, but it also asks us to pay for that ease with our time and near constant attention.
And while I’m not in any way comparing myself to those fevered 24/7 bloggers — hardly! — I think with the completion of this post I’ll take a mini-vacation break for tea and a bowl of raspberries in whole milk. And you, having just read this post, should turn off the computer and do the same.