I've heard that it takes roughly three days to switch out of "work mode" and let go of stressors when you go on vacation. This seems true. At least, it felt true for me when my family traveled to Florida during our spring break last week.
Sometimes you don't know how tightly wound you are until you unwind. The weeks leading up to spring break moved too quickly and had been too full. All work and no play. Deadlines and commitments, plus a double wallop of bronchitis and pneumonia, plus poor sleep, plus general end-of-winter fatigue all added up to one spectacularly lackluster version of me. I felt colorless. Bland. Dull. Flat.
But something changed around the third or fourth day in Florida. At this point, my meds had kicked in — my cough receded, my lungs expanded more easily, my body felt less tired. More than that, my spark kicked in. There I was, lying on a beach towel, pleasantly warm and mostly properly sunscreened. My brain finally had churned its way through a tangled cluster of work-related-thoughts, freeing up the space to think more freely, more creatively.
To the soundtrack of gentle waves, seagull cries, lazy conversations, and aerosol sunscreen sprays up and down the beach, my body molded into the sand and I let myself breathe deeply. In that comfortably warm and hazy space, drifting between partial sleep and happy disassociation, my thoughts wandered.
Beside us were young parents with a baby. As I overheard them instruct her to not eat sand, I thought about parents and children. How do generations keep doing this? This process of being children, then having children, and raising children? How have Joel and I, specifically, done this three times over, this raising of little humans into bigger humans who intuitively know that when they see sand, it's not for eating?
My thoughts flitted to how the sunshine makes the tips of waves glitter like diamonds, then back to whether I had applied enough sunscreen. Somehow it's never enough sunscreen, even if I'm continually re-applying. Inevitably, one rogue strip or section of my body will end the day as if it's never encountered sunscreen, turning a shocking tomato-red.
Without thoughts of work crowding every nook and cranny of my consciousness, and with the freedom that comes from being shaken loose from a routine and dropped into an entirely different setting, other thoughts appeared in stream-of-conscious wisps, random and shaken loose, rising to the surface then evaporating almost as soon as I think them:
I think I'll become a person who does pushups. Like, regularly. I'm going to start doing pushups each morning. Maybe even each evening. I wonder what's the most common color for painting a front door? I look good in baseball caps. What makes a person classy? Why is it easier to dress nicely in the fall than it is in the summer? I should apply to give a TED talk. Yes, I'm going to give a TED talk. Add that to the list of life goals. Could I be a person who shuffle dances?
And the seagulls cried, and the waves lapped at the shore, and the sprays of sunscreen sounded in the distance, and the baby ate the sand despite her parents' warnings, and I lay there, having the best random beach blanket thoughts, and then, with a happy contented sigh, I had one more:
This is it. I've done it. I've finally unwound.
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