Summertime seems to be synonymous with taking vacation time for most people I know. The people I have been talking with recently have either already gone on vacation, are on vacation, or are planning vacation. I found myself thinking about what it means (literally) to go on vacation. According to my Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, one definition of to “vacate” is to “deprive of force or efficacy; make inoperative, meaningless, or useless.”
I love this definition as I think about adult relationships with work relative to our relationships with play. I love the idea of rendering work “meaningless, or useless.” Those who go on vacation tethered to the blackberry and other forms of technology baffle me.
Vacation is a time to vacate the ego identity—role, title, or importance relative to any organization or work. To allow such roles to be vacant means that in some way, shape or form, we deprive them of the force they usually have in our lives. Worry about what might or might not happen during our absence is useless if we truly vacate the roles we serve for the comparatively brief period of time we go on vacation. It becomes useless to invest in any thought or preoccupation with such things, as we hang up our role identities as if they were coats in the mud room, not invited into the inner home or vacation space.
Vacation is a time to rest from all the expectations we create for ourselves and others by adopting work identities or roles in life that we then fill with rules for appropriate and inappropriate behavior. No wonder people are weary and tired. In a funny way, when we have trouble disassociating with our work roles in life (whether inside or outside the home), it’s probably because we have become the role and have vacated our own unique voice. We are empty on the inside and so invest more and more energy in work identities, usually giving our power and light to others in the workplace and to work itself. In my experience, people who carry accumulated unused vacation time as a badge of honor are not usually leading the lightest, most joyful, centered, and integrated lives.
During this season of sunshine and warmth when schools are out and we have the opportunity to go on vacation, let’s remember to vacate the roles we usually play AND leave ourselves open to a time of sheer relaxation with no expectations or rules. Perhaps, with enough practice vacating the roles we will begin to give them a less prominent place in our lives. Let’s use vacation time to remind ourselves to vacate—render them meaningless, or useless—our work identities for the time we are away. AND upon returning to our work lives, we can re-mind ourselves to engage them only when necessary AND leave them in the mud room the rest of the time.
I am on vacation AND I’ll be back after Labor Day.
