The time between is as important as holidays
HOW many times have you heard someone say, “I’ve just got back from holiday and now I need another one!”? Sometimes it’s jetlag. Journeys that would have taken months by boat, imperceptibly passing into new time zones, now take hours. After the great holiday, we feel wrecked for a week.
Whatever you did over the Easter weekend, I hope you had a great time. But how can the benefits of holiday last longer? I wonder whether the issue is not so much the holiday as the way we live between holidays.
Someone told me that Benedictine monks don’t have holidays: they live a balanced life, so they don’t need them. In fact, most monks get two weeks’ holiday a year – not enough for most of us.
Holidays are the carrot that dangles in front of us while we’re on the weekly treadmill.
One of the characteristics of our age is that time has lost its shape. You want some strawberries? Include them in your online supermarket shop, and they’ll be with you in no time, even in winter. Want an Easter egg? Sure, you can buy them months before Easter. Want to see the next episode? It’s available now.
The problem with instant gratification is that you lose the lingering enjoyment of the first strawberry of summer, the sublime taste of chocolate after your 40-day Lent fast, and special occasion of watching the next episode together, having waited all week. Some religious practices help to infuse life with meaning again. The Jewish practice of Shabbat – the day of rest, carefully prepared for and full of delight for the whole family – makes it the best day of the week. Muslims, breaking their fast in the iftar meal, experience Ramadan as a time of joy rather than deprivation. As a Christian, I have been reflecting on the accounts of the first Easter. In Luke’s Gospel I read of women who followed Joseph of Arimathea, the man who took the body of Jesus from his cross to a burial place.
It says, “Then they went home and prepared spices and perfumes. But they rested on the Sabbath.” The result was that, instead of embalming the body of Jesus that night, they became – early the following morning – the first witnesses of his resurrection.
I wonder how many wonderful things we miss because our lives are not so punctuated by life-giving rhythms.
Have you planned your next holiday? Holidays can be wonderful. But I wonder whether we should be as serious in planning our ‘ordinary time’, even fasting from digital media, saying ‘no’ sometimes, so we can say ‘yes’ to meaningful times.
Holidays are the carrot that dangles in front of us while we’re on the weekly treadmill