Vacation Calm: Finding it Close to Home

 

I just got back from vacation. On our trip we snorkeled, kayaked, and hiked in the beautiful Galapagos Islands. The natural beauty we witnessed was beyond anything I’ve experienced in my life. There were swimming pool clear beaches and lava rock hikes, lush greenery in the highlands where the land tortoises live. There were Blue-Footed Boobies, Frigate birds, iguanas and sea lions. And so much more. At dinner the night before we were to get off the boat we’d spent the week exploring on, I cried. 

I cried because we were leaving a place of protected, majestic beauty. I cried because I might never play in the water with sea lions again. I cried because we we returning to cell service. I cried because the chatter and logistics of my job were closer once we reached land. I cried because I felt so calm and I knew that I’d lose this when I got home. 

The day after I got home from vacation I went back to work. “I need a new job,” I thought to myself as I scrolled through two weeks of emails, jotting down to-dos on my spiral notebook. Nothing seemed important; nothing felt meaningful or moving. 

I struggled to focus on my work. I fought off images of swimming with sea lions and sea turtles. I tried to block out the memory of the school of dolphins we’d come across or the baby albatrosses we’d seen nesting. As I stared at my computer I longed for the quiet that came when I was snorkeling, my body gently buoyed by my wetsuit, my breath, loud and rhythmic through my snorkel, schools of fish darting towards and away from me. 

On our trip my niece asked me if it was normal to hear her breath so loudly with the snorkel. It freaked her out and she thought she might be doing something wrong. “No,” I explained, “that’s what you want to hear. That’s normal.” I love the sound of my breath when snorkeling. Amplified like Darth Vader in the darkness under the water when snorkeling, I exist in a suspended chamber of silence. 

This is what I miss as I force myself back to work; back to reality. Is that kind of quiet only possible 3000 miles away on a remote cluster of islands? Is it possible to have vacation calm in real life? 

This morning, still a little jet lagged, I woke up at 5 am and went for a walk in the pitch black cold morning. I brought a headlamp to guide me on the path along the lake. In the dark I could hear the ducks in the lake, an occasional float of coots swooping up and landing a few feet from the shore. It was so quiet I could hear my breath as I walked. 

In the quiet darkness I felt calm. I walked for a long time. My eyes adjusted to the dark and I turned off my headlamp. The air was cold against my cheeks and my eyes watered from the wind. 

I thought about snorkeling, how without the protection of my wetsuit my hands and my ears got cold in the frigid ocean water. I was reminded of the calm I felt floating in the darkness below the surface. As I walked I could almost bring myself back there. The feeling was the same — quiet darkness. It is possible. Vacation calm, just a few miles from my house.