A real vacation

It is low tide.  A huge white seagull glides over the blue island waters and settles down gently, taking up his post at the mouth of the bay. Standing guard on his thin elegant legs, he picks off the trespassers who naively swim too close to the shore. When he is full and the water begins to intrude again he takes off, a large flap of wings arcing over the bay. 

Every day since I've arrived in Barbados the great bird has followed this pattern, like clockwork -and yet nothing like clockwork. This was my first real vacation in four years.  But like any good machine I was programmed to behave in a particular way.  In my  bright yellow  suitcase I had stuffed my laptop and an Alice Walker novel. On my schedule were days to be spent lounging under the sun's rays, but also penciled in were appointments with prospective clients. On my balcony I ate frighteningly fattening breadfruit chips as I scoured over notes for my meetings. I had unconsciously turned my first real vacation into a stiff of a working one.

How unlike the seagull I was, it belonging to a world of creatures who followed a natural course; I belonging to a world of creatures who have fractured continuity into quarter hours and micro seconds.

The seagull reminded me how  much being an entrepreneur had taken away from my ability to relax.  For four years my life had been wrapped around a certifiable, managed event: business building. There was certainly no cosmic timing or internal logic to that. Business meeting, receivables, employee issues, billings, have nothing  in common with the shifts worked by the seagull. The contrast was jarring.

In that moment of observing the seagull, really observing, I closed the cover of my laptop and made a different resolve. I canceled my appointments, I finished my Alice Walker novel, sipped on Pina Coladas. My vacation became a vacation again. I ate when I was hungry, slept when I was tired -and when I was not ,- I made friends with Bajans in the bar.  I did a great deal of the things we call nothing. I hadn't done it in four years.

The most basic of  human rhythms can disappear in our workday lives , the way I suppose the sounds of birds disappears in a city. Another columnist once gave a pedestrian, probably accurate explanation. "From the time we are small," she says, " we tend to wake up with alarms and work to someone else's schedule. We have lunch when its lunchtime we go to bed at bedtime. Sunrise and sunset are less relevant to our lives than 8 to 4 and 9 to 5.  Most of us work for fifty weeks a year in order to have two to ourselves. There is very little room on shopping lists and weekly calendars for being natural. We need literally to vacate the premises of our ordinary life." 

It has to be something of a miracle that given the time, this period of our global history that any of us can find the time reconnect, to go in and out of our own nature. But in the midst of numbers crunching and keeping up with the latest trends, there is a centre waiting to be rediscovered and it can be done only when the body is at rest. That may be what a real vacation is all about. Yet I don't know if I can take the simplicity and the rhythms of nothingness back home. Like fragile sea shells, layered in a glass jar, it does not travel well. By the time I get from aircraft to office the subtlety will have been jarred if only by the sharp ring of the telephone and a client's demand.

But in my list making, schedule arranging, clock abiding life, I can retreat -at least in memory-to the image of a seagull on a bay.