Something For When Summer Vacation Time Rolls Around

 (Now that we're entering that time of year when many of us will take some sort of vacation, here are some tips we post almost every year.


...here some thoughts about the kind of recreation that made this particular vacation so special. We start with a preface about "vacation" in the busy, pressurized, high-tech world so many of us work in these days.

While you're on vacation, you typically want to "get away" from some things - things like work. It can take a while, though, for some of us to really separate from our work. Maybe that's why many of us like to travel some distance from home for vacation. The physical separation helps us mentally disengage.

Then again, these days we're all pretty much "connected" no matter how far we might travel, so the distance may or may not work as well as it once did. Even if you're employer leaves you alone, there can be the temptation to check in - at least mentally - with your work even as you're trying to forget it for a while.

Owning a small business presents special challenges here. When the business relies heavily on your personal involvement day to day, it's easy to justify constant "checking in" to make sure that everything's running smoothly while you're away. It can really be detrimental to the rest, relaxation and recreation that should be the main focus of vacation.

So there are some of the challenges of taking a "real" vacation in our high-tech age, compounded by the seemingly ever-increasing demands of a) bosses who want you to work longer and harder, or b) increasing government regulations, a tough economy, and an unforgiving marketplaces  that squeezes the last ounce out of the typical small businessman day after day. Your physical, mental and emotional muscles, stretched to the limit by the daily grind, need rest and re-tooling. "Getting away from it all," even if only for a few days, can make all the difference in refreshing your physical stamina and restoring your mental balance so you can come back to work flexing those rested corporal, mental and emotional muscles, ready to tackle your daily challenges with gusto - returning therefore a better employee, co-worker, boss or business owner.

But lest we forget those spiritual muscles we all need to live our lives as authentic practicing Catholics in the midst of our daily work and personal lives, we turn now to those of us who may have a tendency to ignore spiritual "work" during vacation. By spiritual "work" I mean your daily prayer, reading, meditation, rosary, Mass, - what are known in some circles as "norms of piety" - that should be part of your daily discipline. My thoughts here are that it's not good to set these aside; better to keep up as best you can without imposing undue burdens on your desire or need for rest and relaxation. Maybe the key to understand the need to keep up with your spiritual discipline can be found in the word "recreation."

Here's the primary meaning of "recreation," and how most of us use this word: "activity done for enjoyment when one is not working." But there's a secondary definition which would be more informative for our discussion that comes from the words origin in Middle English via Old French, which took its meaning from the Latin recreatio (noun) with the verb recreara meaning "create again, renew."

I submit the secondary definition describes a much richer use of "recreation." We're not here focused so much on going to the beach, wandering around an amusement park, or cruising to "the islands" on one of those luxurious ships that offer pleasures a-plenty. Not that any of these is in any way wrong or sinful - at least in and of themselves. But if that's all vacation provides - a diversion or brief respite from the daily grind - you may be selling your vacation short.

Let's use reading a book as an example here. Yes, I realize that for some reading a book has slipped into the dim, dark regions of the misty past, replaced by pix-elated screens that allow quick jumps from one image or group of paragraphs to another. But for those of us who do still - even if less than we might want - read a whole book, let's compare two kinds of "summer" reading. One might be the so-called "romance" novel; the other a more meaty sort of book. I've never read a romance novel, but remember seeing people on the beach reading these when I was a kid. And you occasionally see this on the beach these days too. They're written to "entertain" rather than inform or enlighten. The idea here is that your poor brain craves something light and airy rather than something dense.

OK, I understand that reasoning. And I'm not suggesting you sit on the beach reading St Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica. But if you contrast the so-called romance novel with let's say one of GK Chesterton's books, maybe that gets us close to the second sort of "recreation." To be clear, the second sort doesn't necessarily stand in opposition to the first. It's just a bit richer or deeper.

More on all this next time.