The Pre-Vacation Delusion
I am about to have more than a month off work, which means I have spent the past week constructing a schedule from which I may require medical leave.
This is what happens whenever a vacation approaches.
I begin with the perfectly reasonable desire to tie up a few loose ends. Unfortunately, once I start looking for them, I discover that my life is made almost entirely of loose ends.
There are emails I should answer, appointments I should book, papers I should file and projects I should finish. There are cupboards that have been functioning adequately for years but suddenly strike me as intolerable. The garden needs attention. The car needs attention. My eyebrows need attention.
I have books to write, research to complete, a website to update and several ideas that have been waiting patiently for me to become a better person.
Naturally, I would like to take care of all of this before my vacation begins.
I am calling it a vacation, although I am not going anywhere. I am off work from August 1 until September 4 and have been imagining something resembling Miraval, if Miraval were located on the west side of Vancouver and required guests to unload their own dishwasher.
There will be yoga, acupuncture, massage, long walks and nutritious meals. There will be swimming and golf. There will be early bedtimes, slow mornings and the sort of calm nervous system generally associated with women who own linen trousers in several neutral colours.
I will read novels. I will sit in the garden. I will drink coffee without simultaneously answering an email.
But first, apparently, I must complete my life.
The pre-vacation list began innocently enough. Finish outstanding work. Clean the house. Buy groceries.
Then I remembered the manuscript.
And the research project.
And the stack of books beside my bed.
And the basement.
The list now includes tasks that have survived several previous vacations and at least one change of federal government. Yet I remain convinced they can all be completed in the final days before I stop working.
This is the pre-vacation delusion: the belief that rest begins only after everything else has been finished.
It explains why the day before a vacation often becomes the most punishing day of the year.
We answer emails no one expected us to answer. We clean underneath appliances. We make appointments we have been avoiding since February.
If we are leaving town, we become determined to depart from a home so immaculate that burglars might pause to compliment it.
We change the sheets we will not be sleeping in. We empty the refrigerator. We take out the garbage. We water every plant as if leaving on a polar expedition rather than spending four nights somewhere with room service.
Then we arrive at our destination exhausted, carrying six books, three pairs of nearly identical sandals and the quiet conviction that we have forgotten something.
We have.
It is usually a charger.
But beneath the logistics is a more interesting idea: that rest must be earned.
We may take a break once the work is done. We may sit down once the kitchen is clean. We may read once the emails are answered. We may enjoy August once we have used the first week of August to reorganize the hall closet.
This arrangement would be reasonable if the work were ever done.
It is not.
A life is not a project with a completion date. It is a recurring administrative condition.
The laundry does not recognize vacation. The inbox does not become sentimental about summer. The weeds do not care that you have committed to being more present.
Even our leisure generates administration. Yoga requires booking. Golf requires a tee time. Massage requires forms. A restorative afternoon at the beach requires sunscreen, water, parking and something to sit on. By the time the tote bag is packed, a person could reasonably need a lie-down.
I know this. And still, part of me believes there is a version of August in which I wake each morning with nothing hanging over me because July Danielle handled everything.
July Danielle, however, is tired.
She has done a great deal already. She has also spent a surprising amount of time designing the ideal routine for August Danielle, who is beginning to seem a little demanding.
August Danielle wakes gently at 5:30 or 6:00. She enjoys her coffee. She exercises, journals, reads, writes, gardens, eats well, sees friends, goes to bed at eight and never wonders where she left her phone.
She is rested but productive. Structured but spacious. Disciplined but soft.
She is, in other words, on vacation under extremely close supervision.
I recognize this tendency in myself: given an open stretch of time, I rush to fill it with an improved version of living.
There is nothing wrong with wanting to use time well. A month off is a gift. I want to make things. I want to move my body and take care of my house and return to September feeling that August did not simply disappear into errands and an alarming amount of time on my phone.
But perhaps the desire to use every day well is exactly how a month becomes another performance review.
There is a difference between giving a day shape and demanding that it justify itself.
This is the part I am trying to understand.
Perhaps vacation does not begin when everything is finished. Perhaps it begins when we agree to leave some things unfinished.
Not abandoned. Not neglected forever. Just left exactly where they are while we go for a swim.
The emails can wait. The cupboard can remain chaotic. The stack beside the bed does not have to become a summer reading program.
I do not need to complete all 100 unread books. I could simply read one. Or half of one. Or take one into the garden and fall asleep with it open on my chest.
I am resisting the urge to turn this insight into a new system.
There will be no Unfinished Things Inventory. No colour-coded Rest Without Guilt tracker. No Sunday review in which I assess whether I relaxed effectively.
I am going to keep some structure because I know myself. Without any structure, I can follow a rabbit hole so far into the internet that I emerge knowing everything about a minor member of the British aristocracy and nothing about where the afternoon went.
But I am leaving gaps.
Real gaps. Not 30-minute blocks labelled "spontaneity."
There will still be things I hope to accomplish this August. There will be writing and research and household projects. There will also be mornings when I drink my coffee longer than intended and afternoons that produce nothing more impressive than a walk, a swim or a trip to Chapters.
I suspect I will feel some anxiety about this.
I may look at the clock at 2:00 and think of six useful things I could still fit into the day.
I may do one of them.
Possibly two.
I am not promising a transformation here. It is only July, and August Danielle has not yet had an opportunity to take control of the situation.
~ Danielle