Vacation Variations

"If some people didn't tell you, you'd never know they'd been on a vacation."  

It's strange, I suppose, but this time of year makes me wonder when vacations began—I mean when people started taking vacations. Perhaps I'm channeling Andy Rooney from 60-minutes or something. But haven't you ever wondered who the first people to take a vacation were? Surely cave-men and women didn't have the luxury of taking a day, let alone two weeks, off. What would they have done if they could have gone on vacation? Their job descriptions were simple: find food, kill it, eat it, try to stay warm, sleep, repeat. This cycle of existence left little room for deviation. Any aberration from that mandatory routine and one would starve, or fall victim to something that was more ambitious or hungrier. And everyone else had the same lifestyle. There were no Joneses to keep up with. Everyone had the same challenges and routine—and most certainly no vacations.

My theory is that the first possibilities for vacations came when humans no longer relied exclusively on killing or gathering their food, but when people started growing food. As the planting, cultivating, and harvesting cycles became better understood, that's probably when people finally had a chance to take a little time off. Probably their time off was not what we would consider a vacation, but maybe that's when the farmer would head off for a couple of days to do some fishing. And really that's the real purpose of a vacation. Doing something out of the routine is compellingly attractive, particularly if the routine is, well, really routine.

Jumping ahead multiple thousands of years to the present day, life is different and unquestionably much easier in most ways. Saber-toothed tigers and velociraptors just aren't much of a worry these days. But life has changed in other ways, too. Early man would probably have as little chance of survival in today's world as we would have had in prehistoric times. 

Today's pressures are very different and much more complicated. Not only must we attempt to balance work and family, but we have lots of other responsibilities and demands on our time that our early ancestors didn't have. It's a mixed blessing, but technology has brought us to a point where our lives may be much more complicated than necessary. In some ways, it's like the Rube Goldberg inventions that perform the most rudimentary task by impossibly complicated means.

I'm not suggesting that we all retreat to a remote cabin at Walden Pond, but to many of us that is quite an attractive option for a break in the routine. It really comes down to our perspective. Ideally our vacation should present a dramatic, significant change from our normal routines. People who are employed on cruise ships probably wouldn't choose to go on a cruise for their vacation (even though they would probably get a substantial discount). Employees of a theme park would likely prefer something very different from their usual routine, even though that theme park might be the perfect vacation for someone else who is cooped up in a cubicle for eight hours a day.

Come on now, admit it. A large part of the need for vacation is seeing other people not having to work. Conversely, one of the biggest joys of being on vacation is seeing all those other folks that have to work when you don't. Maybe the best of all is thinking how much your coworkers must be struggling in your absence. But this shouldn't be our primary vacation goal.

Whether we decide to take a whitewater raft down the Colorado River, go to the islands, spend some quality time with the family, or just relax and read a great book, the real value of vacation is to refresh our perspective, enjoy our time off, and be invigorated by the experience.

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