by Marty Coleman | Jul 9, 2010 | Self, Travel, Vacation - 2010, William Least Heat Moon |
Day #4 of Vacation Week at The Napkin Dad Daily
I took my daughters to Europe in 2003. We traveled through Germany, Italy, France and Spain for 2 weeks. We stayed at youth hostels and Bed & Breakfasts.
When we were in Munich, Germany we had beds for 5 in our room and only 4 of us so a single woman from the US joined us. We knew nothing about her, she knew nothing about us. We went out to dinner with her and got to discover her as she was, right then. She was a blank slate, with no yesterdays for us.
We didn’t know if she suffered from depression, with an Eeyore cloud over her head all the time, or if she had been stabbed in the back by her best friend the week before. All we knew was what she decided to present to us that day.
One of the great things about moving away from an old home town, or traveling to a new spot where you spend some time, is that you get to reinvent yourself. You can practice being who you want to be, not who you are expected to be.
But here is the great secret. Every new encounter you are a blank slate. It doesn’t matter if you are in France or your local dry cleaners. That person does not know you or your history. You want to be different than you are in daily life? Then practice on that new person. Be kinder, be more complimentary, be quieter, be less judgmental, be funnier, be happier. You don’t need to go on vacation to become someone new, you just need to see the opportunities right in front of you.
Before you know it, you will become what you practice, no matter where you are.
Drawing and commentary © Marty Coleman
“There are no yesterdays on the road.” – William Least Heat Moon, 1939-not dead yet, American writer of native Osage heritage. Writes particularly about travel, including his best seller, Blue Highways, published in 1982, about his journey on the backroads of America.
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by Marty Coleman | Jul 8, 2010 | Nikos Kazantsakis, Travel, Vacation - 2010 |
Day #4 of Vacation Week at The Napkin Dad Daily
But isn’t this against the whole idea of traveling? That is that you open your mind and allow whatever is really there to come through, instead of creating a vacation of photo ops and prepackaged tours, right?
Yes, that is true, the traveler does need to be open. But the traveler also needs to understand that what is going on when they travel is in their head. They benefit from being able to provide themselves and others a story of their travels and to do that they must be able to create a narrative. Not just a story of ‘I did this then I did that’, but a story that creates itself as you experience it. The aromas you notice as you walk, the look of the sky as the sun goes down, the feeling of the humidity or dryness in the air. You experience your world with awareness is the idea. You notice and remember.
Drawing and commentary © Marty Coleman
“Every perfect traveler always creates the country where he travels.” – Nikos Kazantzakis, 1883-1957, Greek writer and philosopher. Author of ‘Zorba the Greek’.
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by Marty Coleman | Jul 7, 2010 | Frederick B. Wilcox, Vacation - 2010 |
Day #3 of Vacation Week at The Napkin Dad Daily
It used to make me crazy when my mother, then my first wife would demand that we clean the house before we left on vacation. Nothing seemed more absurd to me than that. Why the heck did we need to clean if we weren’t even going to be there, right? Of course, as most of you reading this know (and I finally comprehended before I remarried) cleaning before you leave means you will return to a clean home and that makes the anticipation of coming home sweet, not sour.
This quote is a variation on that. It’s not just a clean home, but your good home that is nice to return to. Whether it’s the colors, yard, smells, bed, animals – whatever it is, if you design your home to be good and uniquely yours, then what a great feeling to know you will be returning to it at the end of any time away, whether vacation, business trip, family emergency or something else.
Drawing and commentary © Marty Coleman
“For travel to be delightful, one must have a good place to leave and return to.” – Frederick B. Wilcox, of which I could find nothing.
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by Marty Coleman | Jul 6, 2010 | Earl Wilson, Vacation - 2010 |
Vacations are the sort of thing where you have unthought out expectations of what it should consist of. I don’t mean the destination, I mean the intangibles that you don’t think of in advance, but you expect to have happen. Perhaps you expect that a vacation includes sleeping in late at the hotel while your spouse expects a vacation to include getting up early and seeing the sites before the crowd. Perhaps you expect a vacation to be all planned out, no surprises while your traveling partner is thinking a vacation isn’t a vacation unless it’s filled with unexpected moments and events.
With my first wife and I we had to come to terms with money on vacation. I remember her worrying about money and what we were spending and me getting annoyed at that. At one point it came to me, I had an expectation I hadn’t realized. My vacation was in large part a vacation from worrying about money!
When we get right down to it the best, most rejuvenating vacations are a break from worry, right? Might be worrying about money like I was doing back home, or worrying about obligations and judgment and duties. So, when you plan your vacation, think along those lines and plan accordingly. What do you want to not worry about?
Drawing and commentary by Marty Coleman of The Napkin Dad Daily
“A vacation is what you take when you can no longer take what you’ve been taking.” – Earl Wilson, 1907-1987, American journalist. At least I think it was this Wilson. The other choices are a baseball player and a congressman. I made the most likely choice to have a witty saying.
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