For many of us, the notion that resolutions are for New Year’s Day just doesn’t resonate. Those resolutions are for amateurs–promises to cut weight or stop smoking or do other things we aren’t already doing.
And the likelihood that the arrival of Jan. 1 will suddenly remake our lives is … what? Judging by experience, not much.
Summer vacation–now there’s a prompt that really can remake our lives. If only we’d let it.
Think of all the positive changes we make when we have time off to get in new grooves.
We really do exercise–maybe by pacing through tourist attractions, maybe by wading against sea waves, maybe by starting the day with a run. The point is, we break a sweat, and that becomes, however briefly, our routine. Vacation is our fresh canvas. We paint on it what we want our lives to be.
We also talk to one another. When we’re on vacation, all those depressing statistics about how little time family members normally spend in sustained conversation at home go right out the window–the one that faces the beach.
Having left our usual distractions (the inanimate ones, anyway) at home, we spend more time actually looking one another in the eye. Maybe over a board game after the sun goes down. Maybe on porch chairs with the too-rarely seen cousins from California. Maybe just over a table at the next roadside Bob Evans.
We also think, fleetingly, about the trajectories of our lives. Are we making the most of what we have? Making the most of the time we have? Making the most of the people we have?
These aren’t gauzy yearnings. These are things we actually do on vacation. Then, though, most of us come home to our daily realities and let them jar these fledgling new vacation habits from our grasp.
We unlock the front door and rush to check for telephone messages. We dash to the post office for the rubber-banded packet of back mail. We abandon the people with whom we’ve just vacationed so we can immerse ourselves in new, time-stealing obligations with others.
What might happen, though, if we were to enact our vacation resolutions, prolonging the new behaviors we promise ourselves during vacations that we will prolong and make them permanent parts of our lives?
Sure, that’s tricky, because when we return to work or school, less of our time is our own.
But that doesn’t mean we can’t keep the spirit of vacation alive, and with it the silent promises we’ve made to exercise more, or to talk with our loved ones more, or to actually look them in the eye over a game board. All we have to do is declare to ourselves that every night when we return home, we’re back on vacation.
