A Life You Don't Need to Escape From
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I have just returned from two incredible weeks vacationing in Europe. For the second time this year, I got to ski and ride my road bike in the same day!
One of my favorite things about plane travel is uninterrupted downtime. I optimistically took four books with me, all business-related. Thanks to a nine-hour delay in the Munich airport, courtesy of USAir, I got through two-and-a half of them.
I read the first book, Seth Godin’s Tribes, on my outbound flight. Given that I was heading off on vacation, I found the words on pages 101 and 102 to be fairly poignant. Given that it’s summertime, I thought it would be good food for reflection for y’all.
That Sucking Sound
On those pages, Godin tells of sitting in the lobby of a Jamaican hotel at 4 a.m., checking email. A woman passes by and whispers to her friend, “Isn’t that sad? That guy comes here on vacation and he’s stuck checking his e-mail. He can’t even enjoy his two weeks off.”
Godin writes, "I think the real question -- the one they probably wouldn’t want to answer – was, ‘Isn’t it sad that we have a job where we spend two weeks avoiding the stuff we have to do fifty weeks a year?’”
I immediately was taken back to Mazatlan, 1989, to a bar called Senor Frog’s, where under certain influences that enhanced my analytical side, and having observed relatively conservative-looking tourists doing things like dancing on tables, I wondered what their lives were like at home. What created this pent-up drunken exuberance, and why did they feel the need to travel so far, to a place where nobody knew them, in order to let it out?
So, I spent the rest of that evening (back in 1989) interviewing them – and learning about the sucky jobs they were escaping.
Twenty years later, there I was, somewhere over the Atlantic with my four business books….setting off on “vacation.” Was I sick? Can I not let go of work? Was I the opposite extreme of the guy from Des Moines doing a half-dozen tequila shots in Mazatlan?
I conveniently concluded that I was okay. My reading does not take away from my family time or enjoying my vacation, and it gets me really pumped up to get back to work. My company was running smoothly without me.
The challenge, as always, is balance. Can we truly enjoy time off without worrying about our companies? Can we be present for our families and still return to work exited and invigorated?
As Seth states, “Instead of wondering when your next vacation is, maybe you ought to set up a life you don’t need to escape from.”
Running With Bulls
As contractors, our options often tend to be polar opposites:
OR
So I encourage you in the coming weeks to take advantage of your “windshield time,” or your “overbooked situation” time, and ponder this: Are you running TO your vacation or running FROM work?
If you answered the latter, make a commitment that this be the last time you run from work. Commit that the next period between vacations will be dedicated to setting up a life that you don’t need to escape from.”
Greg Antonioli is the president of Out of the Woods Construction & Cabinetry, a Massachusetts design/build firm that is committed to open-book management, a team-driven approach to decision-making, and a great relationship with homeowner clients. He blogs for REMODELING every Monday (and the occasional late Wednesday night).