Holiday vs. Vacation
What do you do when you aren’t feeling motivated? What do you do when you feel like you’ve come up to a dead end–when nothing seems to be panning out and you aren’t especially excited about where you are at, and you have no faith in your ability to get anywhere else? Well, this is what the holiday is all about.
Funny thing about the use of words. Here in the States when you go away for a few days we call it a vacation. You are vacating your place at work, basically. So when we go away to get refreshed and enlivened it’s in relation to coming back with more energy to place into our jobs.
In Britain and such they call this same thing going on holiday. Wow. That’s a completely different concept. Holiday is Holy Day–so it’s taking some time to get in touch with all that is holy–it’s some time to commune with our deeper selves, our free selves, the selves we are when we are not chained to a desk, etc.
So. Totally different concepts. Vacations are in relation to work. Holidays are in relation to Spirit, Universe. And so a vacation becomes an escape of sorts, an opportunity to get away from something we are going to come back to, while a holiday is something different, a going into something, a getting closer to and a basking in a sort of freedom that is our birthright, all too often abdicated in the name of honor, duty, and fear.
So whatever the weather, and it’s raining raining raining as I pen these words, and the forcast for the next week looks like we’ll be getting more of the same, taking a holiday feels like exactly the ticket for getting that ticket of refresh and renew that is so necessary from time to time, or as often as possible perhaps.
But I might die tonight!
It’s been a steady drum beat from this neck of the woods that we are all working too much over here, meaning the USA, and that once you factor in commuting, a regular 40 hour job ends up taking up virtually your entire work week, leaving a few hours at the end of the work day to eat dinner and wind down before going to sleep in order to get up the next morning and start the whole damn thing all over again, and then the weekend to try getting in some time for fun and laughter in between shopping, doing the laundry, and all the other little life-chores that we don’t have time for during the work week, which after all is all about work.
Whew.
And for some reason the mentality of the self employed goes down that same damned rabbit hole if not even worse. Remember the white rabbit? “I’m late, I’m late! Oh my ears and whiskers!” It’s the make it happen now so I can enjoy my life later syndrome, which Cat Stevens sang about thusly, way back in 1970 or something like that:
I don’t want to work away
Doing just what they all say
Work hard boy and you’ll find
One day you’ll have a job like mine…
But I might die tonight!
Final Screed
So this seems to be a good week to put a wedge into it and remember that we work that we may live, and that there is something completely screwed up about 100 years of rapidly increasing wealth and productivity and people still working just as much if not more, to the point that they don’t even raise their own children any more!
So anyway, that’s about all I have to say. Tomorrow I’m lighting off to the lakes of New Hampshire, to holiday amongst the vacationers!
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