One thing we can all agree on: vacations are conventional. Everyone knows them, and everyone takes them, often to places that are especially designated as vacation destinations. Northern Europeans spend the better part of their month and a half free from work playing in Southern Europe. Americans, if they have the time and money, go to Northern Europe. And when I was a kid in southern Michigan, my family would often take week long summer vacations to a cottage on a lake somewhere vaguely “up north.”
I am not including in this reflection those who take unconventional vacations. Those people, imaginative in their rest as they are in their work, I like to pretend don’t really exist. Instead, what I’d like to focus on is the main virtue I see in vacations for those of us who are otherwise, in the rest of our lives, eccentric and a little hard to really get. For us, being on vacation can have the virtue of rendering us like everyone else. If it were longer than two weeks, it might even amount to a form of therapy. Where as for the rest of the year people might not really get where we are or what we are doing, when we are on vacation, everyone gets what we are doing. Not only that, just about everyone knows how to approve of what we are doing, and does approve as well.
Think about it. You’re on vacation and posting pictures online, on your social media. You can actually sense that your life is no longer largely submerged or shadowed but out in the open. People actually know what you are up to. “He’s on vacation,” they say. And it’s true. When you are on vacation, people don’t expect your usual you from you. They expect conventional, normal things from you, and they even encourage more of this. In addition to pictures, you gush out reports about the weather and local setting, how trees and houses and streets are different from home. You become downright wordy.
I supported these expectations, indulging in all of them on my trip to Hawaii with my wife this summer. I took the usual tourist shots of us smiling in front of waterfalls and canyons, and there is a canyon on the island of Kauai that rivals the Grand Canyon. We posed in front of monuments and took pictures of the ocean at different times of the day. Every morning, we got sunrise pictures.
It all became a bit exhausting for me, the introverted eccentric. It was difficult to take those pictures and really believe that anyone else would care to see them on Facebook, so I threw in a daily shot I’d gotten of the local fowl–a few of the thousands of chickens that have overrun the island of Kauai where we were staying.
The final tension in all of this was finally relieved when we visited the island’s coffee plantation. Here was the perfect balance between the open and the submerged. Here was the tip of the iceberg, what I knew I shared with the rest of my friends back home: good coffee. Posting fun facts about the care and nurturing of coffee proved to make everyone on my online feed happy and reminded me that I shared more with others than I sometimes believed.
Leaving the plantation and setting out on the road again was to be a bit submerged again. I realized I was thinking about things that I couldn’t, or at least wouldn’t, share. I couldn’t help but notice, for example, that everyone was steering us toward the usual tourist spots and away from the huts and “compartments” where many locals live, or perhaps, huddle. I had questions about where the money is being spent on this island, and although I didn’t ask, I was close to posting my questions about this on social media. I admit that I thought about this, and the fact that I liked being out in the sun influenced my decision. I didn’t post or pose such questions online. Maybe I didn’t because I didn’t want to lose more well-wishing.
I know that none of this is normal. I mean, vacations are normal, and people are on them to get away from daily stress, not start nosing into local politics. And I admit that being away for the time we were helped my wife and me in our process of grieving.
At the end, after I returned to the life that is my own, I found that I liked the convention of the vacation this year. It helped me quite a bit. I wondered, though, about my reactions. I have always thought that we are all like this, that we all live between shadow and sunlight, that we all struggle with being in the open. Lately, though, it has seemed to me that we live in a time when people are quick to encourage what is normal and acceptable, even appropriate. I put some of this down to the revolution brought upon us by the Self-Help movement. Everyone is striving to be five steps up the ladder to something else, and it isn’t part of their success plan to admit that they have, well, doubts. It’s easy to get into this frame of mind and never question anything. After all, social approval and censure are powerful forces.
These are random thoughts from an eccentric who got to be conventional for two weeks. This post started as a “What I did for my summer vacation” exercise as I begin to think about teaching again. Maybe you can tell. I thought I would end by asking you to post something about your vacation this year, both where you went and how you felt being there.
At any rate, whether you respond of not, thank you for reading this far.
Other than a trip to Laughlin this summer, our family really didn’t have a vacation, but I really enjoyed being on yours with you, even though it was only seeing your pictures. I really loved the happy smiles on your pictures and especially loved all the chicken pictures. Thanks for sharing yours with us on social media.
Thanks, Janice. I did enjoy sharing them. I do feel like this was a good experience overall. I think I was dealing with some of the grief yet, and am still dealing with it. Some of this is tongue-in-cheek, of course.