Everything must go.

I have to come clean. For those of you who don’t follow my twitter feed, I amscrayed out of the office yesterday before the day really got going. I felt like crap so I went home and did the logical thing. I opened my laptop on my bed to get some work done from the horizontal. I promptly fell asleep to the gentle whirring of the hard drive. By the way, if your from National Geographic, and you’re reading this, now you know what was said in the voicemail message that I left you that got garbled because of poor cell reception.What I can’t get my head around was the reason for my lack of energy. The week before I was on a houseboat with good friends in the middle of nowhere, Lake Shasta without cell reception or any responsibilities. The big decision of the day was what kind of cocktail should I start my evening with.

Then it hit me. That was my first vacation in over three years and it wasn’t long enough. In spite of the fact that I tell myself that all my overseas travel assignments are a vacation of sorts. They really aren’t. A brief discussion with my father (the doctor) this morning revealed a true definition of vacation; a complete abandoning of all work for a long enough time that you forget about it. Unfortunately, contemporary technology allows us to easily maintain contact with our work at all times. As freelancers we assume that this virtue is all important. We never really let go of work when we are on vacation for fear of missing something. But that’s the point. You are supposed to miss everything.

The hard part is giving up the addictive attributes of the internet. There are million excuses to be online and almost none to abandon it all together. That is until you do, and then you realize everything you’re missing in the natural world around you. Which is, and I guarantee this, far more interesting and inspiring.