The following is an excerpt from Chapter 18 of my upcoming book, A Month of Italy: Rediscovering the Art of Vacation
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When life is a lot like a race, vacation shouldn’t be.
The danger in speaking of vacations is that it feeds the tendency in all of us to want too much of a good thing. What I am advocating is not idleness, but rather a respite from busyness. In fact, to me, idleness and busyness are opposite sides of the same coin: disorder.
Some people tend toward one extreme, languishing placidly and wasting the days of their lives. They buy into the lie that pleasure is the ultimate aim, pursuing personal peace, affluence, and gratification as their top priorities. They seek travel and experiences as an end, in and of themselves. There is a dangerous bait-and-switch dynamic at work behind the pursuit of pleasure as an end, however, and it comes from the fact that pleasure doesn’t satisfy. Instead, it leads to the pursuit of more and more pleasure, bigger and bigger stimulation, all the while satisfying less and less. I have read travel books that are plenty dreamy, well written, excellent descriptors of places and attractions, but they are shallow and Bohemian, leaving the reader feeling empty at the end.
Other people—in fact, most from the crowds I run in—suffer from the opposite malady: filling their calendars so full they blast right through years of life without tasting a morsel of food or noticing a sunset. They are busy, busy, busy; scurrying here and there, convinced that if there is a job worth doing it’s worth overdoing. The crowded schedule and unending demands upon one’s time are often displayed as status symbols. Busyness becomes an outward show of importance. The philosophy goes like this: “I am busy; therefore I am successful.”
Both extremes are signs of disorder; it’s a fact we know deep down inside. "Get back toward the center," some inner voice seems to say, "you’re wobbling like an unbalanced wheel." By providing a chance to think, feel, ponder, pray, worship, learn, and realign with priorities, a proper vacation should ideally restore balance by transporting one back toward that center.
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Sincerely,
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