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| Do nothing at all – and just wait for the brainwave | Do nothing at all – and just wait for the brainwave |
| (2 months later) | |
| Like a lot of freelancers, I don’t take vacations. I work half days, shop or visit the dentist at 3pm, or nap then work late, but a formal holiday never quite happens. This is both a luxury and a curse. There is great freedom in dictating one’s own hours and also a propensity never to stop. Why would you? There’s always next week, or the week after that. Meanwhile, there are just these few things left to tackle on the to-do list. | Like a lot of freelancers, I don’t take vacations. I work half days, shop or visit the dentist at 3pm, or nap then work late, but a formal holiday never quite happens. This is both a luxury and a curse. There is great freedom in dictating one’s own hours and also a propensity never to stop. Why would you? There’s always next week, or the week after that. Meanwhile, there are just these few things left to tackle on the to-do list. |
| So it felt like a strange throwback last week to drive five hours east of Manhattan for my first proper holiday in four years. The apartment complex was on a stretch of idyllic, empty beach and a five-minute drive from a town where a litre of coffee, a bag of pistachios and a small strawberry ice cream cost a fortune, but apart from that was a traditional bucket-and-spade set-up, with a salt-water shower by the sea and gulls swaggering about like sailors on shore leave. | So it felt like a strange throwback last week to drive five hours east of Manhattan for my first proper holiday in four years. The apartment complex was on a stretch of idyllic, empty beach and a five-minute drive from a town where a litre of coffee, a bag of pistachios and a small strawberry ice cream cost a fortune, but apart from that was a traditional bucket-and-spade set-up, with a salt-water shower by the sea and gulls swaggering about like sailors on shore leave. |
| For the first afternoon, everything was perfect. No plans, no stress, just the novelty of inaction. And then, slowly, it started to happen. Lin-Manuel Miranda, the creator of the Broadway hit Hamilton, said in an interview recently that “it’s no accident that the best idea I’ve ever had in my life – perhaps maybe the best one I’ll ever have in my life – came to me on vacation”. | For the first afternoon, everything was perfect. No plans, no stress, just the novelty of inaction. And then, slowly, it started to happen. Lin-Manuel Miranda, the creator of the Broadway hit Hamilton, said in an interview recently that “it’s no accident that the best idea I’ve ever had in my life – perhaps maybe the best one I’ll ever have in my life – came to me on vacation”. |
| The novelist Thomas McGuane wrote about writing and fishing that “the slack line catches the biggest fish”. There is an entire literature devoted to the structural necessity of doing nothing, particularly for those for whom a bad working day can look pretty much the same. | The novelist Thomas McGuane wrote about writing and fishing that “the slack line catches the biggest fish”. There is an entire literature devoted to the structural necessity of doing nothing, particularly for those for whom a bad working day can look pretty much the same. |
| There is one very obvious problem with this, I discovered, which is that if you head into a vacation pretending to embrace the exquisite boredom of doing nothing but secretly hoping the break will serve as yet another tent pole in your productivity, you end up running loops in your head every bit as crazed and unhelpful as the ones you went through at home. Like bad advice about finding love, this is, apparently, insight that can only be gained once you’ve given up looking for it. | There is one very obvious problem with this, I discovered, which is that if you head into a vacation pretending to embrace the exquisite boredom of doing nothing but secretly hoping the break will serve as yet another tent pole in your productivity, you end up running loops in your head every bit as crazed and unhelpful as the ones you went through at home. Like bad advice about finding love, this is, apparently, insight that can only be gained once you’ve given up looking for it. |
| I almost got there. By day three, I had stopped thinking about anything much beyond whether everyone’s bathing suits would dry overnight on the deck and how to get sunscreen on toddlers who don’t want to wear it. Now I’m back and tapping my fingers as I wait for the brainwave. | I almost got there. By day three, I had stopped thinking about anything much beyond whether everyone’s bathing suits would dry overnight on the deck and how to get sunscreen on toddlers who don’t want to wear it. Now I’m back and tapping my fingers as I wait for the brainwave. |
| Signalling problems | Signalling problems |
| The apartment at the beach had bad Wi-Fi. This should have been a good thing, one of those serendipities the happiness industry tells us is essential to the project of saving one’s soul – turn off, switch off, don’t have screens in the bedroom. I wish I could say the poor connectivity made it a more relaxing break. Alas, for many of us, the ability to log off altogether has waned to the point of obsolescence, and the patchy Wi-Fi was a source of constant low-level anxiety and long wasted minutes as I waited for a slow-loading Twitter feed to update. I even drove down the hill, open laptop jammed against the steering wheel, until the signal rose enough for another page of news to load and my spirits to sink slightly lower. | The apartment at the beach had bad Wi-Fi. This should have been a good thing, one of those serendipities the happiness industry tells us is essential to the project of saving one’s soul – turn off, switch off, don’t have screens in the bedroom. I wish I could say the poor connectivity made it a more relaxing break. Alas, for many of us, the ability to log off altogether has waned to the point of obsolescence, and the patchy Wi-Fi was a source of constant low-level anxiety and long wasted minutes as I waited for a slow-loading Twitter feed to update. I even drove down the hill, open laptop jammed against the steering wheel, until the signal rose enough for another page of news to load and my spirits to sink slightly lower. |
| The kindness of strange days | The kindness of strange days |
| We pulled over on the way home for one of the kids to be sick and to recover half a grilled cheese sandwich another had wedged into a crevice in her car seat. In this week of fear and loathing, it was a cheering fact that two cars pulled off the highway to see if we were OK, and both drivers affected to ignore the smell of vomit and Taco Bell wafting out from the car. It wasn’t much, but as things are, small kindnesses go a very long way. | We pulled over on the way home for one of the kids to be sick and to recover half a grilled cheese sandwich another had wedged into a crevice in her car seat. In this week of fear and loathing, it was a cheering fact that two cars pulled off the highway to see if we were OK, and both drivers affected to ignore the smell of vomit and Taco Bell wafting out from the car. It wasn’t much, but as things are, small kindnesses go a very long way. |
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