It’s Friday afternoon, and we’ve just landed in Palm Springs for a six-day vacation retreat from the busyness of our Seattle lives. I am happy to have time off but I’m a bit unsettled, as well. We have a houseful of young adult children and guests and a line-up of planned excursions, dinners out, and plenty of downtime around the pool.
But time off is not what I do well.
I’ve spent years fine-tuning an ordered, disciplined lifestyle, and I love that life. Most of it involves my work as a lawyer in private practice, and it is not confined to a 40-hour work week. People often surmise that I work too much. However, I have developed a highly-sophisticated algorithm based on years of counseling to identify whether my work life choices are right for me: if I feel happy when I start my morning drive to the office, then I’m doing the right thing. Weekends have their own patterns and routines, but they follow a remarkably similar ritual of waking up, structured activities including exercise, and a short but manageable list of must-dos culminating with a small, satisfied thrill when they are done.
Vacation and unstructured time throw me for a bit of a loop. I sometimes wonder, wistfully, what it would be like to happily live in the moment, lounging in the midday sun or darting around spontaneously like a fallen leaf in a spring breeze. But no, not me. Don’t get me wrong: when I’m on vacation, I’m not invested in where we eat dinner, what time guests wake up, or whether anyone opts out of the day’s activities.
When it comes to daily exercise, I have a plan even while on vacation. I know when I’ll wake up (even without an alarm), what exercise will consist of, and approximately when it will start and conclude. For this six-day vacation, that meant three running days, two walking days, and one day hiking Painted Canyon for three hours. Throw in some push-ups and core body exercises, and I called it more than good: structured enough to keep me balanced, and flexible enough to call it a vacation.
What I eat, how much I work, and whether an afternoon nap beckons are choices I can make with some spontaneity. But exercise? Nah. I’m like an old plow horse who loves getting hitched up to the plow. I’ll stick with what has worked for me for over nine years: get up, get out, get it done. And then, get on with a fun, spur-of-the-moment vacation day.