A well-deserved change

Our life as humans is a hard-to-achieve balance between repetition and variety. Repeat it too much and you will unavoidably fall to a feeling of routine and boredom, laboring non-stop in the daily treadmill of waking up, going to work, having dinner, sleeping and repeat forever. Let the variation take over your life and suddenly it lacks any structure, the uncertainty of what is coming up tomorrow so daunting that it is very likely to keep you up all night debating whether you will be able to face or it will tackle you down. The right point lies, as I mentioned a few days ago, somewhere in the middle, but even if you have a general idea of where to start your search it is still not easy to find the sweet spot.

One situation that has proven successful for a lot of people is assuring a significant amount variation for a limited and relatively short period of time, what we usually call a vacation: for a few days or a couple of weeks you get to forget to daily routines, you might be transported to a different environment, maybe a hotel room or someone else's house, with a lot of things to do and very limited time window to do them, so you just plunge into the frenzy almost as if there were no tomorrow. If you design your holidays wisely, you will normally run out of days before you exhaust the panoply of activities to undertake, so you can head back home with a sense of accomplishment and a literal desire to come back for more. The most important aspect is that the vacation is different from the daily life, because just changing the scene does not make for much fun. But it is also true that not every possible trip is equally appealing: some people prefer the beach, others the mountains, still others would thrive in the big city. In our case, it is indubitably the seaside that is the most enticing.

Photo: Marco Verch (CC BY 2.0)

Last year, because of the strange evolution of the corona virus over time, we decided to stay close to home and drive just one hour out of town to a small cottage in the mountains. The venue was OK and the company was great, but we were certainly missing the sun and the beach (or at least a decent swimming pool), so it had the unequivocal feeling of a consolation prize. This year, on the contrary, we have decided to splurge a bit and booked an all-inclusive hotel at the seaside with all the bells and whistles: breakfast and dinner buffet, three swimming pools, air conditioning, cocktail bar and, most importantly, a robust WiFi for the boys. We will also get a chance to visit my brother David, who has just had (his wife has) his first-born daughter, and get to know a bit about their life there.

It will hopefully be a well-deserved and welcome change of scenery, with all the meals cooked for us, no need to do much cleaning and just focusing on the activities of the next day. It was quite an effort to put all the pieces together but now that we are homing in I am so happy that I figured everything out in advance. Tomorrow I will officially start two weeks of vacation even if we are only flying out on Wednesday because I did not want to leave Karen alone with all the suitcases: unfortunately the kids are still not so eager on taking over the responsibility for putting their luggage together, so it is always useful to have at least two pairs of hands instead of just one.

The circumstances will dictate if I find the time to put together an article or two over the next couple of weeks, but I will most definitely be back here on the 23rd, reporting on how our rest goes, the new things that we see, the new foods that we eat, the new people we get to know. In the meantime, enjoy whatever amount of sun you happen to get, because the summer is always four weeks too short. See you then.