All I Ever Wanted

I just got back from “vacation” this week.  (I’ll explain the quotation marks in a minute.)  It was one of those just-because things: I had wanted to go and visit my friend in Boston sometime this summer, and it just so happened to work out the best that I come and see her right after her job ended and bring her back to our hometown so she could spend some time with her family.  I also took the opportunity to run up and see my sister and—equally as important—meet my niece-cat and nephew-cat.  So it was a week of visits, board games, lots of driving, and me finding ways to entertain myself while my hosts were busy.  For some reason, I find it hard to call this a vacation.

It fits the definition—“an extended period of leisure and recreation, especially one spent away from home or in traveling” (which Google tells me is from the OED).  I was away from home, and I was at my leisure most of the time.  But when I think of vacation, I think of glamorous, exciting places—white sandy beaches or gleaming snowy slopes, or else cobblestone streets and ancient monuments and people walking by speaking other languages.  I think of it as a time to move out of what I know of the world and get a different perspective.  The amount of time I sat in my sister’s house, doing exactly what I would have done in my own, seems to serve as a disqualifier.

But “leisure” in the above definition only touches lightly on something that I think every good vacation needs: rest.  Yes, it is good to go new places and learn new things, but what good does it really do to leave the daily grind only to beat yourself into a frenzy trying to get from place to place?  My mind may not have been particularly expanded by this past week, but my spirit felt the benefit of it.  I had time to have a good long talk with my sister, to sit with a purring cat in my lap, to sing through musicals with my friend, to write and to sleep in and to read.  In short, I could do precisely what I wanted to do, and that was truly a delight to me.

Maybe my next vacation will be an education to me, and maybe it won’t.  Either way, no matter how ‘lame’ it may seem to have spent so much of my vacation in my pajamas, I was very glad to have it.  And if I get the chance to have another restful week like this, I will definitely take it.