Imbolc Valentine Moon
Often on Facebook I see people taking time off, time away. An article on how to cope with the flood of news now available and clamoring for our attention suggested not reading any news online at all. Read a newspaper and when you finish it, throw it away. Of course, the idea of a vacation is not reserved for hypervigilant news consumers-like me, for instance-but has broad application in the workplace, too.
It’s an interesting notion, vacating something we either enjoy too much or have too much of, regardless of its valence for us. The theory is, of course, that we leave something behind for awhile, don’t interact with it. We distract ourselves by going on a cruise, hopping a plane to another state or another country. We “unplug”, an interesting metaphor, from the internet or from Facebook or Instagram or whatever time eater we’ve grown accustomed to using.
I’m a bit suspicious of our motivations. We may be solving the wrong problem. I love travel, seeing new places and becoming a stranger in someone else’s world. I love travel not as a distraction from work or home or the current political climate, but for itself, for the fact of being, literally, somewhere else. It seems to diminish travel, at least as I understand it, to use it as escape. Perhaps the differences here are prepositional. In my sense of travel, I travel to places. In the escapist sense we travel away from something.
When we feel a need to escape a cyber world, a work situation, a too familiar home setting, a relationship, is escape the best answer? I’d say no. The more important question is why do we feel the need to escape? What in the current situation seems so unresolvable that only leaving it behind can help?
Those of us who’ve spent any time in AA meetings know about the notion of geographical escape. Alcoholics often convince themselves that only if they were in a new place, a new job, a new relationship, then their troubles would melt away, vanish. The trouble with the geographical escape is the cliched, but true: Wherever you go, there you are. The you addicted to alcohol travels with you.
Addiction is an overused idea, so I’m not going to talk about Facebook addiction or any other, but the issue in all these instances seems the same as a yearning for geographical escape. Something is not working right now, so I need to go. The problem is, there you are.
In other words distractions like new places, new people, new things to do don’t change your inner life. The first question is, what in me needs to be away from this? Is it that this work just doesn’t fit me anymore? Is it that I’ve worked too hard and become exhausted? Have I read and read and read about other people’s lives while forgetting to be in my own? Have I somehow misused the opportunity that this job or this person or this cyberplace has to offer?
Answering these sort of questions before deciding to vacate makes a lot of sense to me. This is not an anti-vacation diatribe, however. Rather, it is a how you define is how you solve sort of diatribe. Identify the true issue and work on that first. Then, figure out someplace or something you can move towards, travel to the beach or the mountains or Korea or the ballgame, not away from wherever you are.
