September is a time for everyone to start over. Young and old, passionate and impatient with the “back to”. Some face the return with energy and some with stress, some have a thousand good intentions and some are unprepared to readjust to the routine. Has the time come to change the rules?
The beauty of vacations, when you can really disconnect, is that you lose track of time. You wake up in the morning and you don’t know what day it is. You don’t even care, because Sunday is the same as Monday. If you’re good enough to immerse yourself completely in the place you’re going to and disconnect from the other world, the one you usually live in, perhaps helped by another time zone, you can even experience 30 or 40-hour days. You wake up in the morning and it feels like you’ve been away for a lifetime, but it was only the day before yesterday. It’s when you get off the rails of your usual routine and venture out on unexplored roads that everything expands. And every minute takes on such a dense specific weight, such a full intensity, that it’s worth ten.
Work-Life Balance: From Vacation to Everyday Life
The bad thing is when you come back. Getting out of that bubble of volatile and intoxicating minutes like laughing gas, to land on the hostile and rough ground of everyday life, where the hours rise like dry stone walls and the notifications in the diary mark obligatory paths along the way, is not easy. There are two ways to come back from vacation: refreshed and optimistic, full of good energy to face autumn. Or nostalgic and sullen, unprepared to readjust to short days and alarm clocks. From first grade to today, not much has changed . There are those happy to return to school and those who would rather be kidnapped by Willy Wonka’s nutcracker squirrels. The difference is that over time you learn to pretend.
My back to work
Personally, I fall somewhere in between those who are passionate and impatient with the “back to,” those who are made to fall back effortlessly into the rhythms marked by the bells and those who don’t even unpack their bags, dreaming of other possible escapes, other horizons. I have certainly understood over time that the best way to get back into line is to plan a gentle docking. Never on a Sunday evening to cushion the trauma of Monday, never on the eve of important commitments. It takes at least a week of decompression to ensure that the body and brain can slowly refuel, remaining in a holiday atmosphere where work almost seems like a pastime. Fan on one side, Piña Colada on the other, you sit at the computer as if you were watching a sunset, with the background of the spin cycle (you have to wash your dirty laundry) and the illusion of stopping whenever you want. Clear skies. All that’s missing is the sea.
