Vacation and insane expectations
Today’s the first day of my four-week-long vacation. When people get back from their vacations, you often hear them say that they wish it would have been longer, that it is too early to get back to work, and so on. The reason for this isn’t that the vacation was too short, but that they were expecting it to be longer.
This sounds weird, but it is actually true. What matters is not the length of your vacation, but your realizing that it isn’t any longer than the, in my case, four weeks. Even though you are consciously aware of it only being four weeks, you more or less unconsciously wish for the four weeks to be five weeks, or six weeks, or longer. So you need to realize that four weeks is no longer than four weeks.
If you succeed in not acting as if you had one or two more weeks, you will be ready to go back to work after your vacation. The first time I realized this, I managed to “tune” myself into having “sane” expectations about the length of my vacation. I found that I could forget work and relax, fully enjoying being on vacation. I’m positive that if you expect more than four weeks (or how many weeks you have got) your vacation time will be affected by the frustration that it will end sooner than you want it to. You won’t be able to wholeheartedly “be” on vacation.
Many things in life are like this, that you have – sometimes unconsciously, sometimes semi-unconsciously – “bad” expectations about things, which cause your days to be marked by frustration. It might, for example, be about the weather (which is related to vacation). You might expect it to be sunny every day, which in some places on our planet is a sane expectation, but in Sweden it’s not. This week we had a hailstorm in Stockholm, for example. So for Swedes, the weather is something you’d better not have expectations about.
Kjell recently blogged about the blessed unpredictability of life, so I came to think about this again. I’ve had it on my to-blog-about list for a while, and now that I go on vacation it’s timely to blog about it. One major key to enjoy life is to come to terms with the unpredictability of life, as well as with what are sane expectations and what are “insane” expectations.
I think that very often when you find yourself frustrated or in distress about something, that the reason is that you either have expectations about something that is unpredictable (like the weather) or about something that is plainly wrong (that four weeks vacation equals six weeks of “real” time). Try to explore your expectations to find out if they are sane.
Today, many people experience a very convenient reality, where they can buy anything they want from their local grocery store, where they always have electricity, where the bus or train comes, if not right on time, then at least not four hours late. Basically, the things around us just work. When something doesn’t meet our expectations, this deviates markedly from what we’re used to, which is why I think it is so easy for us to develop these insane expectations. When the world doesn’t match our insane expectations, it’s the end of the world!
Alan Watts has written about how life, right from the start is an endless race for “something” that will come in the future. In school, that something is graduation and starting to work. When you start to work, it’s getting better positions in the company, more money, a bigger house, car, and so on. Then comes retirement, which seems to be the thing people race towards. Nirvana and infinite bliss!
As for the insane expectations about the length of vacations, I think the foundations are laid in school, where most of the kids are tormented and when summer vacation arrives, it initially feels like an infinite vacation. In school, vacation is the something that you race for. Naturally you expect it to last longer than it will, because you don’t want school to start again. When you finally graduate, you feel free! It’s the eternal vacation! Work after all must be vacation compared to school, right?
Then after a few years you find yourself in the same race as before, only now the vacations are shorter! And it is decades until you “graduate” into retirement! In your spare time, in the weekends and on your vacations, you want them to last forever. “Damn, it’s Monday again! How could that happen?” Or for that matter: “Damn, it’s time to get up and go to work again!” – – – How can you possibly enjoy your spare time, weekends and vacations under these circumstances? As soon as vacation starts, it’s as if you already long for the next vacation. Isn’t it?