14 August 08 - 05:39
On Vacation
We had a good week in Pennsylvania. I've been going to that medieval fair just north of Pittsburgh for twenty-four years. I used to go there and race around and try to meet people, to see and be seen, to try never to miss a thing on the schedule. Now, I go to sit around and visit old friends, to shop for a short list of things I can't find anywhere else, and perhaps ultimately because every year, I learn something cool. This year my eldest daughter bought a kit to make a four stranded Norse cord, which involves suspending four pieces of yarn on light weights (we used four plastic water bottles, with the ends of the strings stuffed inside). Two people face each other, and toss the cornerwise bottles to their partner, alternating. My eldest tried it first, and did very well, but I had the most fun watching my hubby and my six year old son trying to catch the bottles, and laughing every time they missed. They wove three or four feet of cord before they were done. You couldn't figure out how to do something so simple and so fun if you were rushing from one thing to another on a schedule, could you?
I'm sitting right now in Toronto, at my friend's house, while she and my hubby have taken all five of our assorted children out to a UPick operation, and since there weren't enough seats in the van, someone had to stay behind. Twist my rubber arm. 
The chance to sit alone in a quiet house with no one even knowing the phone number to call me is an unaccustomed luxury, and I am totally enjoying it. I love being on vacation. It's about the only time I really ever slow down.
We did a spiritual exercise this past fall. I put all the months of the year on the floor in a circular path, and I invited everyone to walk from one month to the next, experiencing as they did what that month meant to them, and what it meant to move from one month to the next. Some people said that the month a parent or grandparent died was a hard month to leave. Others experienced joy as they moved to a spring month with a happy association. I found it hardest to move from August to September, because September meant that my vacation was over, and I had to go back to work, back to living on a schedule not always of my choosing.
I realized a long time ago that one of my most pressing spiritual challenges, the one I struggle with almost daily, is a need to please other people. And to please people these days, I have to keep very busy. We live in a very busy society where in order for that society to work, people need to be certain places at certain times in order to do certain things, or the whole system falls down. Even in the microcosm of the family, if dinner is at 6 pm and not everyone is present and ready to eat at that time, if the dinner makers aren't home in time to produce the dinner, then a family dinner isn't possible. Since our society is constantly trying to get more and more things accomplished on a faster and faster schedule, it isn't hard to see that shortly the dinner makers and the dinner eaters are going to be having a harder and harder time getting it together. Stress results, not to mention a certain amount of strain on the relationships that really matter to us.
Vacation, for me, is a time to reset all that. It's the only time of year my schedule isn't determined by my promises to other people. The other ten or eleven months of the year, I rush around like a chicken with my head cut off, trying (and usually failing) to live on a schedule that crams more into a day than is good for any normal human being. But I protect my summers with the fierceness of a mother bear with her cubs. I really want to have a time when there's no schedule, and no expectations. Even when I was on call for two weeks earlier this summer, I found it really hard to make myself check the voice mail on my work phone. I think I was afraid that someone would tell me something else I had to do, when I really needed to live on unagenda'ed time.
Today we're in Toronto, but tomorrow we start heading back towards Halifax. I'm going to be sad to move on, even if we do have a few more days of visiting family and friends. I haven't yet figured out how to take this sense of pausing and taking things slow into the rest of my life. It's a balance issue that I think I'll be struggling with for a long time yet.
Hope I haven't been rambling too incoherently. But if I have been, it's okay. I'm still on vacation.
Blessings, Heather.
one comment
Hi Heather: It sounds as though you have had a very good and Godly vacation with lots of time just to be and to re-charge those ever-running batteries. I am hearing such a whistful tone to your blog – coming back to the every-day pressures and schedules can be numbing,but it is sometines necessary for the pushing forward of our life. I hope that what I am hearing is not a desire to run in any direction possible than the one you placed in for at least the next year. How may we be of help to you so that you come back to us with some measure of anticipation for a new year – just like the children returning to school with new notebooks, sharp pencils, and clean erasers? You and yours, as always, are in my thoughts and prayers. Brenda
Brenda - 21 08 08 - 01:52
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