hit the road

We need to get away. I mean really away.

Away from the siren call of our laptops and tablets.

Away from the urge to check our Facebook page “just one more time,” in case we missed anything. {You didn’t. I promise.}

Away from the Twitter stream scrolling like a Wall Street ticker tape.

Away from the urge to peek, I swear I’ll only do it once today, twice max, at the Amazon book rank.

Away from all the announcements and declarations and opinions. Away even from the good stuff – the celebrations, the party pictures, the 20-year anniversary photos, the blown out candles. Because even the good stuff can be too much when it’s constant, ever-present, right in our face.

I recently returned from ten days on the East Coast, most of it spent in a rented beach house in Rhode Island with my extended family – my parents, my sister, my brother-in-law, my nephew and Brad and the boys. For the first time since leaping into this writing life five years ago this month, I left my work at home.

I closed my laptop and put it on my desk. I didn’t write while I was away.  I didn’t blog. I didn’t tweet. I didn’t update. I didn’t pronounce or announce or declare. I took the very occasional Instagram photo and posted it to Facebook, but other than that, social media was dead to me.

Instead, I did a whole lot of sitting in a beach chair with an old-fashioned book in my lap (I read Under the Wide and Starry Sky, by Nancy Horan, which I very much enjoyed but not quite as much as her first book, Loving Frank).

I caught crabs with my kids.  I mostly watched, but I did let a tiny crustacean crawl across my palm twice. It felt like a bug, and I tried to be brave but failed considerably.

I ate an epic amount of homemade guacamole and as much fresh fish as I could because, you know, Nebraska.

I drank in deep draughts of cool, sea air while I sat on the couch and drank ginger tea in the middle of the night when I couldn’t sleep.

I talked about books with my best friend.

I walked dipping, curving, seaside roads and ogled cedar-singled homes I could never in a million years afford but why not pretend anyway for a minute, right?

I ate slowly and savored. And then walked off my meals, strolling leisurely, imaging what life in a bustling 18th-century seaport town must have been like.

I spent almost enough time with my people. We gathered around picnic tables and paper plates. Around sand castles and plastic buckets of baby crabs. In rocking chairs and chaise lounges, on the sofa with our feet propped on the coffee table, on the screened porch under the oaks.

For ten days I put everything aside: the writing, the book proposal that’s still up in the air, the Amazon rank, the followers and the stats and the future. I didn’t think about what was going to happen next, beyond what flavor of ice cream I might try at the stand we seemed to find a good reason to visit nearly every night. I didn’t dwell on, “What happens if?” or “What will I do when?” I was simply at the beach, with my family, fully present, full of peace.

We Americans work pretty hard, don’t we? Our companies typically give us far fewer paid vacation days a year than our European counterparts (an average of 21 paid vacation days a year for Americans compared to 34 paid days for workers in Spain and Germany, and 31 days for those in France and Italy — and the United States is the only industrial country that does not provide a legal guarantee of paid leave.). And even when we do get paid vacation days (and one in four working Americans don’t get any paid leave at all), only 25 percent of us take our allotted vacation time for the year. 

For the love of the land, what is the matter with us?!

Here’s the truth; here’s what I learned when I took a real vacation for the first time in a long time. Everything falls away. Or I should say, everything falls into place. Everything important, that is. Family. Conversation. Connection. Love. Joy. Peace. It’s all right there, waiting for us to relish. But we have to be there — present, alive, awake, in the moment, our hands free of our devices, our minds unburdened from our work — to embrace it.

Take a real vacation this summer, friends. Take the full two weeks you have coming, all 14 days. Leave your laptop at home. Plug your phone into the charger, behind the toaster if you need to, so you can’t see it.

And then head to the beach…or your backyard. You won’t regret it, I promise.

{Linking with Kelli Woodford for Unforced Rhythms.}