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Dot-Calm: It's been over 25 years since I left school for the working world, and I still have not recovered from the trauma of losing the two-and-a-half month summer vacation that is the birthright of American children. Each June, like a salmon's urge to struggle upstream and spawn, my brain answers the call of summer recess and is seized with the urge to flee my CRT-irradiated world of projects, deadlines, microns, and megabits for the calmer, more invigorating confines of an old convertible bound for parts unknown. While I've spent most of my adult years trying my best to suppress the inevitable lethargy and restlessness that pops up each summer as relentlessly as the crabgrass on my lawn, I've recently discovered that honoring this healthy instinct can actually be a good thing for my work, and for my family.
Somewhere in the distant past, I seem to remember having taken vacations regularly, but the past decade's activities had made that a non-option. If I was not getting a spacecraft ready to launch, or finishing up a college degree, the publishing industry I have worked in for the past seven years has seen to it that my time was so tightly budgeted that vacation was squeezed between deadlines in two- and three-day slices that were either spent with relatives or used to do emergency home repair of one sort or another. It's only in the past two or three years that I've started to take non-working vacations on a regular basis, and they have really made a difference in both my personal and professional life.
I break down vacations into two types—adventures and relaxation—and I try to get in at least a week of each every year.
While I have always enjoyed going on strenuous adventures to places I have never been, my wife, Catherine, has finally introduced me to the pleasures of simply hanging and relaxing. We do most of the latter out at her family's cabin in northeastern Maine, just a dozen miles east of Bangor. Located on an island and only reachable by boat, the two-room cabin has a big porch, but no electricity, no phone, no Internet access. We do, however, enjoy lights, cooking, and refrigeration from a pair of propane bottles that are hauled in at the beginning of each season. Although we finally brought in a wind-up radio for getting weather and emergency bulletins, it remains silent most of the time, and our only regular source of media in the house is the piles of old books that line the walls. Besides reading, there is not much to do other than to hike, swim, fish, canoe, kayak, pick blueberries, practice crafts, and chat over a gin-and-tonic while you sit on the porch to watch sunset.
Being as wired as I am, it took me a few years to get used to this level of non-activity and a pace of life that makes watching paint dry look exciting. But something happened about three years ago, and I now look forward to spending a week in a two-room cabin where "logging in" means putting wood in the fireplace, and "download" means hauling the swimming tubes down from the rafters.
The first few years we were together, I humored Catherine's need to spend time at the cabin, but it wasn't easy. I would go into e-mail withdrawal, suffering from the dry throat, headaches, blurred vision, and twitching keyboard fingers that usually accompany a prolonged POP3 Server failure. I could only take 2–3 days cold turkey before I found myself volunteering to go for groceries, hardware, or any other excuse to take the boat across the lake, drive the half-mile of rutted cow-path, and the 10 miles to town where I could at least listen to my voice-mail service.
Things changed about three years ago when my daughter, Anwyn, who had just turned two, and I discovered the joys of Play-Doh. Sitting around the kitchen table one morning, looking for something to amuse ourselves, we stumbled upon a few cans of the salty modeling clay. With nothing better to do, I plopped down a few chunks of red, yellow, and white clay in front of us and proceeded to demonstrate how to make snakes, dogs, airplanes, and a passable likeness of Bullwinkle the Moose for my daughter. Anwyn and I were especially pleased with the tri-colored bust of Nixon that I painstakingly spent half the morning on. Anwyn enthusiastically followed suit, shaping amorphous blobs of Play-Doh into other unrecognizable shapes that she insisted were also snakes, dogs, airplanes, and of course, Nixon.
Somehow, a morning of unconstructed fun allowed me to begin to see the value in a week's worth of sleeping eight or nine hours a night, and how ignoring the latest developments in network processors for a while can improve your productivity in the "real world." It's also very nice it is to be able to spend a whole week hanging out with your kid without worrying about whether you'd better get back to the computer to answer your e-mails or get out to the garage and knock off the repair project that you've promised to do two months ago.
Now that I am accustomed to these self-imposed "technology fasts," one of the best parts of my vacation is waking up in the morning and having nothing more important on the agenda than asking my family whether we should go pick blueberries for a pie after breakfast, or kayak over to the other side of the lake to watch the loons teach their young to swim. Somehow, this week or two of quiet and simplified living realigns my internal compass and replenishes my inner reserve of calm for at least a month or two afterwards.
Thanks to Catherine and her family, I've come to treasure my time on the lake, and to use the quiet time we spend up there to get the rest and perspective that helps me function in the rest of my life. Hopefully, Anwyn will share the spiritual treasures we give to her now with her own family when she comes of age. At five, she can already paddle a kayak, identify a few birds, and harvest the wild blueberries that grow all over the island. Next year, I'm going to teach her to fish, to identify constellations, and how to make wild blueberry pie, but I'm not sure if she'll ever be able to make a Play-Doh Nixon as good as mine.
Comments? Questions? Requests for busts of Nixon?
Write me: lgoldberg@green-electronics.com
Reflections on the Value of an Unplugged Vacation
by Lee H. Goldberg, Senior Technology Editor, ChipCenter
The 2nd Shift—Human Factors Archive
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