The Challenges of Vacation
With regard to keeping at a routine (such as writing each day), vacations can make things quite tough. The usual order and schedule of things is turned upside down, leaving us without the well-established grooves in the road. The grooves can keep us locked into our habits, for better or for worse.
I was away this weekend, having left Saturday morning and returned Tuesday morning. That is four days where the usual routine is altogether disregarded. Before leaving for the weekend, my goal was to really push hard and figure out what about vacations made writing difficult, and what challenges might best be overcome.
Having made it to the end of the trip (and currently getting myself back into the swing of things), I can report both victory and defeat. I am proud to say that I was able to find the time do write during my trip (even if not every day). The downside, though, is that the day of my return, things are still unbalanced enough to throw me off track.
So then, leaving a routine is hard: but coming back to it is also difficult. That is my little point here. You can force yourself to find the time to write in the vacation itself, but that doesn’t mean that the return to the normal life will be smooth. Bumps in the road may occur at any place and will always be of slightly different shape than those seen prior.
My answer, in close, is to fall back onto a lesson learned well in previous years. When muscling through those days of “getting back to normal” when everything is messed up, busy work is your friend. At its best, busy work doesn’t involve thinking or necessarily require inspiration. Yet it counts as work, on some level, and must be heralded as such.
So now, on this day of return, I shall type of the five pages of hand-written scribe I took down over the trip. This stuff will have to be typed up eventually, and what better than a day like today?
For tomorrow, it is truly back into the sway of things. I shall rest myself very well tonight to make this final stage of the return a proper one.
