Days of wine and gelato

Vacation can be about a lot of things: it can be about seeing new places, visiting family, or just not being where you normally are. Most of the time vacation is about relaxing which is why quite often vacation is anything but. People on vacation feel as if they “should” be relaxed and very little works less successfully than forcing yourself to relax. But when you scrape away all the ideas about relaxation and “de-stressing” and education and “quality time” with the family, most vacation is about changing your perspective.

Humans are creatures of habit. A study last year in Europe that tracked people’s movements via cell phone revealed that “[t]he vast majority of people move around over a very short distance – around five to 10km [approximately 3-6 miles]…” It stands to reason, then, that vacation is about breaking habits. And nothing breaks habits like being dropped in a foreign environment, especially one in which you are forced to deal with a different currency and a different language.

Traveling in a completely foreign environment forces you to be present and to engage with the world. The struggle to meet your basic needs – food, shelter, security, toilet – forces you to pay attention to what is going on around you and to really consider not only your choices but what you actually want rather than what is convenient, habitual, or what you think you “should” be choosing. It also forces you to prioritize what is really important and necessary and what isn’t.

One of my problems is that I get too wrapped up in my work. I’m lucky in that I have a job that allows me to work to my strengths. It requires creativity both of the traditional kind and the “we’ve got a cotton swab, five inches of string, and a piece of duct tape and we need to build a working rocket in 15 minutes” kind. Did I mention there was problem solving involved? Yeah, I get a kick out of that. It’s also one of the few white collar careers where at the end of the day I can point to something, even if it is something as fungible as a web site design or a bit of content that someone may or may not read, and say “that’s what I did today.” Since I work in a progressive non-profit I am, theoretically, “doing good” at my job. But even though I work some place where we strive to do more good than we do harm, the simple fact is that my job is not important, or at least not immediately, tangibly important.

How do I know this? Simple. I answered these three questions: If I fail to do my job, or I do my job badly will anyone:

1. suffer injury
2. be subjected to conditions which could make them ill
3. die

For me, the answer to all of these questions is no, and unless the answer to at least one of these questions is yes, your job isn’t important.

Now, a very rational argument could be made that we are all parts of a much larger system and that if you extend the impact of someone’s failure to do his job well far enough that eventually the answer to one of these questions is yes, but the reality is that extension of impact is an intellectual exercise and most of us do work that on a daily basis really just doesn’t matter.

This is not a bad thing.

Knowing that my work is just a way to finance the rest of my life is fine, but feeling it is something completely different.  And I’ve been feeling it lately.

Actually feeling this will keep me from getting caught up in the artificial self-importance that seems to stank up every organization, non-profit or otherwise, but more importantly it will allow me to correctly budget without being unduly influenced the time I have in the face of way too many responsibilities.

With luck, practice, and concerted effort, I can keep this balance.  And while I’m trying to do that I will keep in mind this lovely quote from Bertrand Russell: “One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.”