A three day weekend coming
up, lovely late spring weather graces our days, school
is out, the summer stretches before us—all suggest
time to relax, refresh, renew. Of course, this summer
renewal doesn’t stretch as far as it used to, back
in the VERY OLD days when school didn’t start up
in the fall until after Labor Day. Nonetheless, for the
first time in several years, it will be late August rather
than early August or even late July when students head
back to the classrooms.
I breathe deeper just thinking
about it. Change the pace, slow down, go away, enjoy neglected
friendships and family time, read good books, play a lot
more, work a lot less. Doesn’t it sound wonderful?
But there seems to be a sense of nagging guilt attached
to the idea of just . . . playing for a while.
As everyone seems to know,
we working people in the USA don’t get nearly the
vacation times that the rest of the modernized world seems
to enjoy. According to one statistical table I found,
Americans get between nine and nineteen vacation days
a year, depending on the numbers of years worked. The
minimum number of vacation days in almost every other
industrialized country is 20, and many are as high as
25—and if you are lucky enough to be in France,
your vacation days total 36! But what is worse than the
paucity of our assigned vacation days is that many, many
people don’t even take the days given—one
survey says that 35% of working Americans leave vacation
days on the table.
And I’m not even sure
young schoolchildren get the luxury any more of real stretched-out
summer vacations—especially if they are enrolled
in some of the highly competitive sports leagues or scholastic,
art or music programs. Required practices, heavy game
schedules, intensive camps, special lessons, evaluations
and tests. So much pressure. So little time just to play,
to be unscheduled, to ignore clocks and deadlines, to
daydream, to sleep.
For much of the history of
the world, time just to play has been a real luxury, available
only to the privileged few. For those who live in subsistence
economies, where finding enough food for survival can
consume much of the day and most of one’s energies,
the idea of “free” time or play time is pretty
unimaginable.
But we do not live in subsistence.
Most of us have way too much food and spend only a small
portion of our incomes on groceries or dining out. We
do have time for play, for imagination, for deep rest,
for the ability to re-charge the creative possibilities.
And we don’t take it. It is as though the world
will fall apart if we don’t work every moment.
Hmm . . .looks to me like I’m
talking myself into some vacation time here! In a few
weeks, I’m going to head to New York City to see
my three sons, two of their spouses and the lovely girlfriend
of the third, take my grandson for long walks in Central
Park and enjoy the nicely blooming pregnancies with my
two daughters-in-law. Before I go, I think I’ll
sprinkle my work schedule with a few extra days off, sleep
late, be lazy, and see just how good that feels. Even
God rested on the seventh day, and arranged for the people
who were to follow God’s laws to get one year off
out of every seven years of work. Perhaps a generous vacation
policy may just be a holy act. Sounds good to me.
