Learning How to be Idle on Vacation

We’re closing in on a month away from home, give or take, as our Summer of Nova Scotia, catalysed by L.’s need to be relieved from summer camp CIT duties on the weekends, continues. We were a week near Inverness, Cape Breton, a week in Port Wade, in the Annapolis Valley, and we’re midway through a rainy week here in Bedford.

This morning I came across this, by Maggie Martens, in How Much Work Will I Do On My Summer Vacation?:

It’s not awful, though, working on vacations. I know I’m not supposed to say that. I know we all need more rest. But I’m also a working parent. And a freelance working parent of young children. Which means, everything I do is taking time from something else. And the work I do is because I need to pay my credit card bill, yes, but also because I feel called to do it. I enjoy writing about women athletes, and doing interviews, and digging deep on book research that I don’t think anyone else will do. Le sigh. Also, sometimes I need a little vacation from family on these trips (remember, I did not grow up doing this) and having an excuse to hole up in a coffee shop early one morning by myself to send a few emails, or draft up a story, isn’t the worst thing ever. Is that healthy? Probably not. But I’ll take some time to reassess that next year  — maybe on my family vacation.

During my intense working life—which is to say, “while I was working”, which is to say “while I was working, and had built a system that was entirely dependent on my hyper-vigilance”—I was no stranger to working while on vacation. Summer vacation. Winter vacation. All the vacations.

Like Martens I turned this into a lifestyle rather than an inconvenient intrusion. I coded websites in the attic of an ancient house near Montpelier, I managed servers on a makeshift desk in a reimagined medieval village in Italy, I scratched my solo travel itch by building adventures into work trips to New England. With the exception of some almost-completely-work-free travel with Olivia during school breaks, when work would have simply been untenable, I took my work on the road with me.

Like Martens wrote, “It’s not awful, though, working on vacations.” 

Being able to climb down a flight of stone steps to the village café, in view of the mountains, beats going to the same old same old coffee shop yet again. 

An excuse to retreat from family caregiving duties and self-isolate in a work bunker (or, in the early days, stumbling around an ancient city looking for open wifi) was a needed and welcome pressure-release.

Taking my work on the road was a cornerstone of being able to maintain my lifestyle as a well-paid one-man operation responsible for the hardware and the software from underground to the surface.

The lifestyle, which I lived for more than 25 years, had great benefits. It also rendered me unused to the idea of a vacation with idle time: on the working road all the idle moments got swept up in escape to the work bunker, so the days were, in essence, fun family activity, work, eat, sleep. The idea of rest didn’t really enter into it. Neither did the idea of rest with a partner, in particular with a partner who herself is challenged by the very idea of deserving rest, let alone how to take it.

I’d like to say that, absent the pressures of day-to-day digital work, I’ve learned how to rest, but I’m still figuring it out. The idle still seems too idle. I feel the pressure to write something. Or make sure my webserver is up to date. Or to plan something. Or just to fidget and spin time away. Or to endlessly introspect. None of which is restful nor relaxing.

I do not begrudge the years I spent working-on-vacation, vacationing-while-working: I got to see some fascinating places, to live as a local, to imagine living otherwise, elsewhere. But I did rob myself of the opportunity to learn how to stop. I’m grateful for the chance to learn it now.