I used to dislike the word "vacation"

But I've come around.

Creation of Adam by Michelangelo

No. 104: I used to dislike the word “vacation”

You may or may not know, I’m on vacation. 

And for a long time that word, “vacation,” irked me.

If vacation is an incredible thing, where does that leave normal, day-to-day life?

Mentioned in conversation, vacation seemed to have a sad, secondary meaning: that normal life is something less than incredible, even worth escaping. 

Why not just say, “Next week, my temporary experience of a life lived more sweetly will begin”?

As you can imagine, this was a bummer for a youngin about to graduate from college and enter the normal life everyone seemed so willing to ditch.

Which is surprising, given I’m someone who had the privilege to go on many vacations with my family growing up, all of which were awesome. 

We went to Mexico many times to visit family and for just for fun. Hawaii. Disneyland. Yosemite. Tahoe. We stopped in destinations all around North America and her surrounding islands on cruise ships. Sometimes, I met girls. I definitely met good friends. I saw incredibly beautiful places and pretty scenes, like the first time I saw a sunset from some place far enough out in the Pacific Ocean that you couldn’t see land. (Some say if you look closely you can see a green flash when the sun, dipping into the horizon, passes through the water. I think I saw it, but it may have been my imagination.)

Once, on a fishing charter in Punta Mita, Mexico, my family and I caught a sailfish. We took turns on the reel. It was no quitter. We saw it breach and thrash in the air, its tall sail rippled and flashed in the sun. No animal in the world seemed more perfect or more powerful or more beautiful than that fish. And a vacation gave me — us — that. 

Had I started my vacation philosophizing earlier, that might have settled it. But I didn’t back then I was just a student, an athlete, a kid with a part-time job as a lifeguard at the local pool. I didn’t plan vacations, or pay for them, I was simply told we are going, said Sounds great!, and enjoyed.

Then, reality neared. 

To put it off a little longer, I went to Europe for the first time after graduating college. And this was around the time that my skeptical feelings toward to word “vacation” began. In Europe that first time, I summed things up with a strange philosophy: The real vacation was life itself. Wherever we go after and wherever we were before is a return to some kind of normal state. 

This trip, and some maturity, has made me rethink things. 

Vacations are great and necessary and don’t need to imply that normal life is some kind of hellscape.

Normal life is just . . . different, hence vacations. 

As easy as it is to idealize living life as a non-stop vacation — especially when young and inexperienced — normal life necessarily comes with certain stressors.

We have work. We have relationships to maintain. We have financial considerations. We have ups and downs. We have challenges to identify and overcome. We are striving.

This is life. At least part of it. And life is beautiful because of this and more. The concept of living life as a non-stop vacation? Impossible. A misnomer. Ridiculous. 

You simply can’t, because in normal life there will always be something to think about. 

Again, hence vacations.

While on vacation, for a temporary period, you can stop thinking.

That’s the beauty. 

Vacations are something you account for in advance. You set aside some money. You make plans. And you go. And while you’re gone, you don’t think, because you don’t have to think — or strategize or scheme or calculate — because you’ve taken care of everything in advance. 

This is awesome, and rare, and much needed.

But, of course, you’ll still think.

Kind of.

More so, you’ll reflect. With nothing consequential to think about, by pressing pause and stepping peacefully away for a moment, you can consider all that you have in your normal life, how far you’ve come, where you are and where you’re going. This, I think, can only happen on vacation. And it’s essential to living well, I see now.

Vacations don’t take away from normal life, making it seem shitty and boring by comparison.

They enhance it.

All that you’ve done in your normal life is what landed you here.

These were realizations I stumbled upon walking around Palatine Hill in Rome, a place I’d been before on that trip to Europe I took after college. 

I thought about that younger me — that five-years-younger me. 

And I saw a dude that was freaking confused. 

I had no idea what was coming next. No job prospects. No lover. No income. A bank account that was quickly dwindling, a (happy) problem exacerbated by being in Europe with a return flight two months away. I wasn’t very healthy, drinking lots, and smoking cigarettes. I might have even been sad, which I wasn’t aware of then, but remembering my lifestyle back then from today’s vantage point? That guy looks a lot like an unhappy dude — but maybe I was just . . . sprightly.

Then I thought off how far I’d come since.

In the five years since I went to Rome that first time, I got my first job-job. Then, I got better jobs. I met new friends. I fell in love with the girl that’s now my fiancé. I moved out of my parents house and into an apartment in cool city. I moved again, this time into a house — in Chicago of all places for a Californian to land. I found cycling and the feeling of living and eating well, one that I once knew and had forgotten about. I got back to writing and reading. I started this newsletter. I survived a damn pandemic. 

In short, I came very far from where I was, in Rome, just five years before, and back then couldn’t have imagined any of what was ahead.

With this in mind, I envisioned meeting that younger version myself there on Palatine Hill — I remember exploring Rome that first time, the places I walked, the clothes I was wearing, the sheer amazement — and wished I could tell him all that was coming for him. Mostly I wanted tell him that, believe it or not, everything would be alright. 

And I felt so, so happy. 

It’s nice, too, that that strange philosophy I came up with back then can still apply.

Maybe this life really is a kind of vacation, and if so, it’s one that helps our souls grow and appreciate all that we have become and are becoming. Sure, there’s an end. But I can say with certainty that the happiness I feel right now, on vacation, won’t match all that I’ll feel coming home to the life I’ve built, the life I’ve been lucky to live, that “normal life” filled with so much love. 

Which bodes well for whatever comes next.

There’s no reason to fear. 

Everything is going to be alright. ♦

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Weekly Three

HEAR: Weirdly, “Clarity” by Zedd feat. Foxes was stuck in my head pre-writing this newsletter. I just kept singing, out loud and out of nowhere, “If our love’s tragedy, why are you my remedy?”

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post about falling in love with a house in Northern Italy.

VIEW: My bike ride through the Chianti region of Tuscany today.

^If you enjoyed this post, consider sharing it to help me find new readers. I’m going to send it to my little sister, the closest I can get to talking to my younger self.