Vacation and insane expectations (revisited)

It’s one week after my vacation ended. When it began I wrote about vacations and insane expectations. So did I expect it to be any longer than the four weeks? No, I actually managed to maintain sane expectations about its length. But a few times during the last week I caught myself having that “my vacation is infinite” feeling.

What’s interesting is that when my vacation ended, Liina got sick so I had to stay home and take care of Elvira. This was totally out of line with my expectations. In a way, I was so stuck trying to be realistic about having to go back to work, that when this happened I was caught off guard. The first day I experienced, not a lot, but a fair amount of stress. I tried to do some work at home while Elvira was sleeping, but I couldn’t stay very focussed. In the evening I was totally washed out.

I remember reading one short passage in One Continuous Mistake (see review) about burning yourself out as a writer, which is a good thing according to this book.

“Zen activity is activity that is completely burned out. Nothing remains but ashes. This is what Dogen meant,” Suzuki-roshi told us, when he said, ”’Ashes do not come back to firewood.’ If you do not burn yourself completely, a trace of yourself will be left in what you do.”

Burn yourself completely? Isn’t that a formula for stress? Ironically it’s just the opposite. Stress comes with resistance, when there is a “no” lurking in our behavior. The “no” acts like a barrier keeping a part of us at a distance. When we “burn ourselves completely” we sear the part that prevents us from being wholehearted.

This first week after vacation I have thought about this a lot. During vacation I kept a very slow pace in things I did. I might get a lot of things done some days, but somehow I still proceeded slowly. I maintained a “slow” mindset. I didn’t need more than six hours of sleep. I awoke by myself, without an alarm clock, at about six each morning, stood up and sat in the kitchen doing some reading and some blogging.

The first day after vacation, when my expectation to go back to work didn’t fall out and I tried to do some work in the midst of taking care of Elvira, it became very obvious how different that day was from the days of my vacation. I began to think about how to maintain that slow pace even when it isn’t vacation.

During that first day, there was “a ‘no’ lurking”. It was the “no” of “this was supposed to be my first day at work” and “perhaps I can get some work done anyway”. In order to keep the slow pace, you must immerse yourself in what you are doing. Resisting wears you out. It makes even simple tasks stressful.

I did go to work on Wednesday and Thursday and on Wednesday I succeeded very well in keeping the slow pace at work. (This doesn’t mean I didn’t get much done, though.) But on Thursday I tried to fix a very tough bug and I forgot about proceeding slowly. The more frustrated I became with not being able to reproduce the bug, the more resistance built up in me. On the way home, I successfully shifted out of thinking about work, so I was less tired in the evening than I expected, but still more tired than the evening before.

To wrap things up, my expectations about my vacation might have been sane, but my expectations about going back to work were insane. My going back to work seemed to be fairly predictable, and being eager to not have unrealistic hopes about four weeks turning out to be five or six weeks, I came to expect actually going back to work on that day. (See another post about this.)

In my first post about vacation and expectations, I said that sane expectations were essential to being able to fully enjoy one’s vacation. This is about immersion; about not having a lurking “no”. The same goes for workdays: If you’re not completely “there”, you will (unconsciously) resist work and thus experience stress. You will waste energy. The same goes for anything you do.