Vacation isn't a competition

The case for revisiting your favorite places

Photo from MVV on Unsplash

I naturally wake up earlier on vacation. My internal clock is set to “Don’t waste a drop of daylight” rather than “Work? Again? Didn’t we do that yesterday?”

It’s tempting to reach for an adventure, to make the most of this free time. We hope that something new and exciting will knock our pieces around until they fall back into place, but we’re a bit more complex than a Boggle set. It’s tempting to roll those dice, but what we often really need is rest.

Adventure is great for the brain. New sights, new smells, new tastes. It expands our understanding of just how much is going on under our shared sun. But there’s also something to be said for going back to the known. The comfort in the familiar. The safety in the same.

Knowing what comes next isn’t a recipe for learning and growing, but that’s the point. We’ve all tuned in and and then tuned out of a rerun of an old show like The Office or Seinfeld because it requires very little of the central nervous system. It’s basically white noise. So much of our lives are unpredictable, though, that a day or a week of routine can bring our seats back to their upright starting position.

So this is the case for incorporating some intentional repetitiveness into your time off. For going back somewhere you can find the silverware without having to pull out every drawer. Vacation isn’t a competition; it’s the release of a breath you’ve been holding in for far too long. Can you let it go?