​Our mind is a storehouse of memories.  These are memories of events, sights, sounds, aromas, feelings, people, and places.  They include layer upon layer of stories.  Some are readily recalled while others are lost in the depths of our identity.  They shape and re-shape our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.  Whenever we use 1st person, singular pronouns we are talking about the reservoir of memory within our minds.
 
For the last 500 years, we have relied on our mind for every aspect of our lives.  We believe that everything around us is knowable.  Mysteries are simply things we do not yet understand.  We “live and breathe and have our being” (to borrow a phrase from the New Testament) in our minds.  We are who we remember ourselves to be.  The world behaves as we remember it to have behaved.  When we are caught off guard or surprised, we tell ourselves that we have more to learn.  This storehouse of memories is an essential part of who we are and who we are becoming.  We will surely suffer if we do not feed our mind well.
 
The growing edge of our lives exists on the margin of experience, where our mind is caught off-guard and we are encouraged to stretch and expand who we are.  The experiences of awe and wonder, curiosity and unknowing, surprise and shock; challenge us to see things differently and appreciate the world and ourselves in a new way.  They help us to rediscover forgotten strengths and capacities.  They help us to identify our vulnerabilities and weakness.  They enable us to renew and refresh our stories and lead us to seek out new stories.  Vacations are most meaningful when we journey to these margins of experience.
 
Vacations are opportunities to renew, refresh, and expand this vast inner storehouse of memories. They may stimulate us to remember old memories that have laid dormant in the recesses of our mind.  Or, they may help us to re-remember old stories that have grown stale or no longer inform us about ourselves or those around us.  Vacations also help us to create new memories. 
 
In short, vacations give us an excellent opportunity to re-remember.  A healthy vacation will help us to reconnect with ourselves, our hopes, our past, our companions, and our world.  These reconnections happen in the re-membering of the person we have lost in the “bump and grind” of our day-to-day living.  We may rediscover our roots, get in touch with who we are, or see the future in our passions and hopes.   And all of this takes place in our memories, in the making and in the re-membering.

​Very often, even though we may take our body on a vacation, our mind stays at work.  We keep the cell phone on “just in case.”  We check our work email “just in case.”  We keep returning to our internal to-do list “just in case”.  Here are several suggestions for how you might take your mind along on your vacation.  The “justincase” is one bag that needs to be left at home before you leave.  Focus instead on the re-membering.  Here are several suggestions for taking your mind with you on vacation.
 
Go Someplace New – when you are planning a vacation, pick a place or two just because you have never been there before.  On a family vacation to Cape Cod many years ago, we decided that we needed to visit Cranberry World Headquarters.  I can honestly say that that side trip is among the most memorable trips of any vacation.  It still brings laughter and joy to our family in the re-membering of that moment.  You do not have to plan a whole vacation around someplace just because you have never been there, but a side trip or two can be very rewarding.
 
Visit with People who have known you for a long time and listen! – While it is true that you can’t go home again, it is a nice place to visit from time to time.  Listen to the stories that your parents, grandparents, childhood friends, cousins, etc. tell about your growing up.  Their remembering may not be the same as yours and they may not remember things that you believed were powerful moments in your life.  Their stories can help you see yourself in a whole new way.  It is well worth the trip down memory lane.
 
Revisit places you have lived – When in the area, make a swing by your old home or school.  On a trip through the Midwest, we made a quick detour to see the house we lived in many years ago.  We were immediately struck by the large trees that surrounded the house.  We remembered that we had planted those walnut and oaks but they were just sticks when we left.  They now provided shade for a yard that was littered with children’s toys.  We were re-memebered with our children when they were little, ourselves when we were young adults, and the friends who helped us plant those trees.
 
Take a class or seminar – If you cannot afford to take a vacation, take a class instead.  Find a class at a local junior college, community learning center, or library in something that interests you.  It may be a hobby like painting, photography, genealogy, scrapbooking, or woodworking.  You may want to audit a summer class on history or literature or computers.  You may take lessons in golf, or swimming, or yoga.  Find something that excites your curiosity and look around for a short course or workshop for your vacation.
 
Read a book or two – Another way to expand and renew our mind is to read a book, or two.  It can be fiction or non-fiction, a how-to or a history book.  Enter into a conversation with the author and allow yourself to travel to their world and listen to their story. 
 
Spend time with Yourself – Take some personal time to just be with yourself.  Allow yourself time to explore your memories.  You may want to pull out the family photo albums, or look back at that box or memories you have stuffed in the back of closet.  Allow yourself the opportunity to get to know that person you once were and the people who were once the center of your life.
 
Enjoy your journey by re-membering yourself into your future.

How Our Brains Make Memories
 
The Right State of Mind for Vacation
 
Going Home Again

​Vacations can be physically exhausting.  The main reason is that we tend to replace business with busyness.  Busyness is activity for activity sake.  We have the time so we fill it with doing stuff.  On a road trip we will squeeze in one last tourist stop instead of getting to our hotel and spending time by the pool.  During a staycation we add one more project for the house rather than having a picnic and walk in the park.  Busyness exists to prevent us from getting bored or “not having anything to do.” 
 
This busyness has several significant consequences for our body.

• We may not get enough restful sleep.  We sleep “just enough” to get by so we do not “waste” precious vacation time.

 

• We may not eat very well.  Because we may be traveling, we may eat more fast food or foods we normally avoid. After all, we tell ourselves “We are on vacation!”  This may lead to overloading on carbs, especially the liquid kind.  Too many carbs steal our energy and disrupts the biological rhythms of our life.

 

• Busyness can also steal away the reason we went on vacation.  It can lead us to hurry past or through the moments that renew and refresh.  We take a 15-minute catnap when we really needed an hour to sit and read.  We hurry past a chance to talk with our companions in order to get to the next tourist trap.  We jump on a crowded, noisy bus to make a two-hour tour of downtown historic sights instead of taking a morning and walking the same tour with our family.

 
Busyness encourages stress.  It distracts us from our real needs for rest and refreshment of our weary body.  The rule of thumb for physically en-joying our vacations is very simple.  Too much IS too much.  Have enough to enjoy your time and then move on.  Enjoy that single scoop ice cream cone and then move on.  Take a dip in the pool and then take some time drying in the sun.  Go ahead and get up at 4:30 AM to make the trout run, but when the sun has risen into the morning sky, take a walk and listen to the water, the wind, and the birds in the trees.
 
Vacations are not a sprint to the first day back at work.  They are a leisurely stroll through your life until you return to your usual routine.  May they fill you with en-joy-ment.

​Here are three tips for caring for your body while on vacation.
 
Feed your senses.  The same sensation that is experienced repeatedly makes us numb to it.  Whether the sensation is touch, taste, smell, hearing or seeing, over-exposure causes us to lose our appreciation or even our ability to experience that particular sensation.  Awaken all your senses by giving yourself a full menu of sights, sounds, tastes, textures, and aromas.  Allow each one to fully express itself before you move on, but do not linger.
 
Find a new daily routine.  If you are a routine kind of person, find a new daily routine that is comfortable for you.  You might change the time you get up or go to bed.  You may replace your drive to work with a period of meditation or a walk around the block.  Allow yourself the freedom to eat a light snack between lighter meals.  Allow yourself time to sit with your own thoughts and become reacquainted with your life.  A new daily routine can give your body the space and permission it needs to care for itself.
 
Most importantly, our body needs rest.  Make time for naps or quiet reading or a brief walk.  Allow time for your body to enjoy a bit of exercise.  Allow a light meal that you share with family and friends.  Let it linger on for several hours.  Get the sleep you need each night.  Allow your body to reset its own sleep cycle but do not force it to wake up on some arbitrary cue.  If it wakes at 4:00 am because it wants to greet the sun, then get up and go.  If it says, “OK, I’m tired.  Let’s take a nap!”, then listen to it and find some shade. 
 
Take your body on vacation and let it lay aside all the busyness of living.  Enjoy, refresh, renew as your vacate your daily life for a time of rest and re-creation.

Busyness – the New Consumerism
 
Are Vacations Bad for You?
 
The Importance of Resting
​

​Over the next few months, many of us will be taking a break from our routines and go on a vacation.  We may take a few days or a couple of weeks.  Our vacation may involve travel to new places or visit family or friends.  It may include staying at home and taking care of some projects around the house.  These qualify as a vacation if they bring rest and refreshment to our body, mind, and soul.  However, not all vacations measure up.
 
Vacations can be stressful before, during, and after.  They can steal away whatever remaining joy we might have.  Ineffective vacationing drains us.  When we finish, we feel more like a survivor than a vacationer.  We return saying, “I need a vacation from my vacation.”  We have all done it.  We have greedily packed so much into our precious time off that relaxation gave way to anxiety, and rest yielded to keeping to a schedule.  We over planned and under-recreated.  We placed a higher priority on getting it done than on ourselves, our family, or our friends. 
 
Over the next few weeks, we will be exploring ways to find joy in our vacations.  Remember, a vacation is a vacating of your routine life in order to change the scenery, rest, refresh, see things from a different perspective, and allow yourself to simply be.  We spend so much of our year doing, earning our living, justifying our existence in work that we simply need to step back and be who we are.  This may require getting back in touch with ourselves and those closest to us.  It may mean turning off the company email and allowing others to take over our responsibilities.  I hope you re-discover the joy of vacationing!

There are several questions you may want to ponder before planning your next vacation.  These grow out of my own experiences.
 
Early in our marriage, I planned our family vacations around a very tightly, organized schedule to maximize our time.  After a couple of these, the family rebelled because these trips were making me a nervous wreck and I was yelling and screaming all the time.  And so, Marlene and I came up with three rules for the road on vacations.  1) We travel, as much as possible, on non-interstate highways.  2) We eat at non-chain restaurants and try to order their specialties.  3) We plan our itinerary one day ahead.  Over the years, we have modified these a bit, but they helped me to break many of the unhealthy habits I had developed around vacationing. With these few articles, I hope you will be able to write your own rules for the road for your next vacation.
 
Not everyone vacations in the same way.  As you prepare, ask yourself a few questions and then listen carefully to your answers.
 

1. In your work-day living, are you a planner or an explorer?  What will be more relaxing for you, continuing to plan every step of the way or setting off into the unknown like an explorer?
   
2. In your work-day living, are you engaged with people or pretty much on your own most of the time?  What will bring you a greater sense of renewal, being with your close family or engaging with others?  If with others, would you be able to enjoy being with family, friends, and/or strangers who have a common interest? 
3. In your day-to-day living, do you follow closely kept routines or is every day a new adventure?  What would make your vacation less stressful, establishing a routine and sticking to it or just letting each day unfold as it will?

 
There are no right or wrong answers to these questions.  Your answers are simply suggestions about how you might create your vacation experience.  Enjoy preparing for a vacating of your routine day-to-day life.

Why Take Vacations?
 
Why Take Vacations, Part 2?
 
Lisa’s 10 Rules for the Road

Unhappiness is a visitor to all our lives from time to time.  While it is never fun, as an occasional visitor, unhappiness can make us grateful for our better days.  But, when unhappiness moves in for good we become stuck.  We may feel trapped, angry, guilty, or scared.  Fortunately, we can accept responsibility for our unhappiness.  What do you mean?  Do you think I want to be unhappy!? Do you think I chose this?  What did I do to deserve this?  Before you become too upset, please read on a little further. 

Responsibility is not about blame and fault.  The dual mind likes to assign fault and blame as a way to judge between truth and fiction, right and wrong.  But personal unhappiness is a complex human response to a vast array of inner and outer experiences.  The common understanding of responsibility as a game of fault and blame does not apply.  Responsibility is about the ability to respond. 

Responsibility is about the ability to respond to affect a positive change.  We are unable to change many of the factors that may have led to our unhappiness, but we do have control over how we respond to all of them. In this sense, we are responsible for our unhappiness.

One of the reasons we endure dis-ease in our lives is we feel powerless, like victims.  When our body feels strange to us, it is because it has changed and we didn’t pay attention.  Our minds grow small by walking the same paths and living by shorthand thinking – prejudices and clichés.  Our souls become stuck in yesterday’s feelings because of the fears of today and tomorrow.

By accepting responsibility for ourselves and the unhappiness that we must endure from time to time, we can limit the power that this unhappiness will have over our lives.  We can rediscover the joy of living.

While I was in college, I would hang around the Sociology Department.  (Marlene was a Sociology major.)  One of her Professors would get quite irritated when he saw clumps of students hanging around the hallway and would command us “Go read a book or something so that you will have something to think about when you are fifty!”

Our three score and ten are not guaranteed, but more and more folks are living far longer than they ever imagined.  It is very easy to slip into patterns of living and never even think about changing them until something happens and we find that our lives are too small.  This is why it has become necessary to take care of ourselves throughout our lives.  We need to nurture our body, mind, and soul.  They need to serve us for a lifetime.

Keep growing!  Keep learning!  Feed your curiosity!  Allow yourself to experience wonder and awe.  Let yourself be surprised by people and events.  Continue to build memories by travel.  Stay connected.  Make new friends.  Build and renew long-time relationships.  Most of all refuse to become stagnant.  If it ain’t broke, break it!  When staleness begins to creep in, refresh and renew yourself. Take responsibility for your own happiness and allow yourself to live life each and every day.

Staying Young at Heart

Getting out of Stagnancy

Taking Responsibility for Ourselves