Vacations

For as long as I can remember I’ve spent a week in the summer vacationing with my family. When I was a child, I camped with my parents and brothers in Vermont or Maine. When I grew up and married, my husband and I continued the tradition by vacationing with our four children, sometimes camping and sometimes renting a cabin. Now that our children are grown, our vacation week has become a sort of family reunion, Every year we pick a different location in northern New England. Whether oceanside, lakeside or in the woods, these places are always enchanting. No matter the weather, we spend what seems to me an idyllic week, reading, hiking, talking, laughing, playing board games and soaking up the details of our surroundings.

This year we rented a cabin on the coast of Maine, a stunning location right on the water, overlooking rocks, a short walk away from a small sand beach. All day and all night we were bathed in the sounds of the tides; we watched terns and cormorants and canvasback ducks fishing. (I was stunned at the speed of the terns as they dived headfirst into the water. I wondered why they didn’t break their necks.) We watched lobster boats circling off the rocks, and sailboats weaving among the islands. We saw huge tankers gliding north along the horizon. One day we watched a tall ship to the south navigate out to sea and back again. We saw the full moon rise on the water, and I even got up before dawn one morning to watch the sky turn from purple to pink to palest lavender to gold.

As always, the week proved too short, and towards the end of it, I found myself wishing I could stay longer. I imagined taking up permanent residence there. I thought I’d like to see what it’s like in fall and winter, to witness the emergence of spring, to spend summer after summer in the same beautiful spot.

This year, when I got home, I began to think about what this sort of vacation does to me. I thought about how I experience a bit of a jolt as I reenter my ordinary life. Enjoyable as the vacation was – perhaps because it was so enjoyable – it makes the “real world” feel a little bumpier, a little more uncomfortable, than it did before.

We live in a world and a time when vacations are considered not only fun but necessary. They’re so thoroughly integrated into our lifestyles that some of us live from year to year for our vacations. And, of course, many people make their living on other people’s vacations. In some places, including the state I grew up in, tourism is the biggest sector of the economy.

Yet, for most people in the world, and certainly most people in human history, taking a vacation is an alien concept. That doesn’t mean that all these people experienced their lives as unbearably grim. Perhaps they knew something that I don’t.

For years I’ve searched for a way to take the essence of vacation and marry it to everyday life. What I’m really doing, I think, is yearning to make the unfamiliar familiar.

I would like to think I can learn to enjoy my familiar surroundings in much the same way that I enjoy the unfamiliar ones of a vacation. It will certainly take mindfulness, a conscious attending to the details of my environment. It will require a new sort of receptivity, a trust that beauty is all around, even – perhaps especially – in the most ordinary details of life.

Familiarity doesn’t always breed contempt. It can breed a new sense of wonder, a renewed immersion in joy. Sometimes it can even breed love.