Vacation? Yes Please!

I’m going on a vacation!

I haven’t been on a vacation for about 14 years or so, and I’m a little nervous about it.

See, there was a time that things were different. My mom and I used to enjoy vacations. Roaring River State Park and Caplinger Mills in the Ozarks, Mark Twain’s home and Saint Louis, travelling around in Missouri.

I used to have a lot of interest in travelling. My first girlfriend and I went to Houston Texas to see the Johnson Space Center, which was one of my dreams. It was my first vacation by airplane, and it had its own terrors, but it was worth it.

About a decade later, things were all different. Marriage, children, and various other factors had changed my life around as well as my interests and personality. In time, all I wanted was to stay at home, generally in my bedroom. We still travelled some, but in time my wife and kids went on vacation, while I had my vacation at home.

I lost the ability to sleep in hotels, to relax while travelling, and the notion of vacations left a bad taste in my mouth. Going places and seeing the world took a backseat to surviving day after week, month after year.

After 2008 and my divorce, I began trying to simplify my life. Over the years I started rediscovering myself, which included figuring out what I was interested in again. I have trouble sleeping anywhere other than my own bed. I started walking at a park in town which was mostly pleasurable due to being outdoors and around nature.

My young lady in recent years has talked of wanting to really travel. She’s been to Boston, to California, to Florida, but really it’s almost always been for reasons other than simply vacationing. She has been in a holding pattern for years, waiting until the time and finances were right to see the sights beyond a thirty-minute drive from home.

Finances were never going to be accommodating, so she decided it was just time to go. She asked me, the now-timid homebody, about going on a real week-long vacation down to the Ozarks.

As scared as I was of leaving the familiar (again, this was a development in my world, not really the actual me), I said yes. I haven’t had a second thought about it.

Now I’m packing for the trip.

I may not sleep much, but I promise I’m going to relax.

There’s another dimension to the matter of going on vacation however. A very Mindful dimension.

It took many years of deterioration to relieve me of my inner interest in things. My inner self went into hiding like an abused puppy.

So now I’m facing those coping mechanisms and all the conditioning that robbed me of myself.

Mindfulness encourages me to allow my true inner self to come out of hiding. I have fears, and that’s okay, I don’t have to feel ashamed of them, or like I have to deny or “fix” them. I am free to feel the fear, but I’m also free to choose what I want to do about it.

My path is now one of healing. So I’m going to go watch fireworks over the Ozark lakes even if it gets loud. I’m going to have a vacation that isn’t planned out completely, something else I developed a problem with over the years.

I can mindfully allow the vacation to unspool however it will without worrying that it isn’t living up to her expectations or mine. I’m free to just live in each moment of the vacation come what may. Every wave on a lake that laps against the shore will be a wave I’ve never seen before and will never see again.

Whatever else we do might not pan out the way we expect it to, or the way we want it to. But I’m going to enjoy them, because I’ll be experiencing the world a moment at a time with the woman I love.

By leaving my expectations at home I’ll be able to leave my worry about everything at home as well.

What? A vacation that involves getting away from the drama and anxieties of recent life? Where I can just go and enjoy whatever happens, not worrying over who I’m with or what might happen?

A vacation I can enjoy again?

Yes please!

The Hill

It was around 1969, maybe in the early or late summer. My parents and I were driving back from somewhere but I was too young to really remember for sure, but I know we were in a dustbowl part of Western Kansas.

I only recall fragments of trips back then; a lot of driving with the windows up and both parents smoking which often made me nauseous. My dad had family in Colorado who we visited to ride horses (I was a little bitty thing then, but I rode for a moment), and he also had relatives in Hayes, Kansas. So either of those could have been where we were returning from.

At some point in the early afternoon, we were driving through an arid patch and there was some discussion in the front seat that didn’t sound overly promising to me. We pulled over and we got out of the air conditioned car and stood on hard dirt in the hot sun. I asked my mom why.

She told me something about my dad wanting to go climb a mountain.

There were tall hills and I seem to remember buttes around, and apparently my dad felt the siren’s call of one of them. So we watched my dad head off towards adventure, and finally he disappeared into the distance. He said he wouldn’t be gone long.

I don’t know how long he was out there, but I recall at some point the sun began to sink, and my mom became more and more impatient. Soon she started calling out for him to come back, but of course all she did was make herself hoarse. Finally she just told me to stay there with the car because she was going to go get him.

I was probably 4 at this point, and the distance was too far for me to walk in the heat and too far for her to carry me. So I stood by the car watching my mom disappear into the distance that my dad had already disappeared into.

All alone, in a hot deserted part of Kansas, I stood crying. I eventually started calling for my parents, but I do not recall them coming back. At some point I must have crawled into the back seat and cried myself to sleep.

Fast forward to some point in the late 1970s and my mom and I lived in Independence, Missouri which meant occasional road trips to Nevada Missouri where we had been living until recently. My dad’s mom and grandma lived there, and so did my mom’s parents. We made the long trip down highway 71 quite a lot.

Going out 71, just outside of Butler Missouri, there was this hill. It was a two-level affair to the side of the road. With half the hill, then a plateau, then a steeper part of the hill to the top, it was captivating to me.

I asked my mom frequently if I could get out and go climb it. I was always told no, but I never lost the pure desire to climb it. I felt the hill before we made the curve and it came into view, coming and going. I stared at it as we past it each time.

On August 4, 2012 I was driving back from Nevada in the mid-afternoon. My dad had passed away earlier in the year and my mom had been gone since 2008, and this would be the last time I would drive down to Nevada with any real purpose. I felt the siren calling as I approached the curve. As I rounded the curve, I found myself pulling over and stopping.

I never intended to stop and climb the hill. It never entered my conscious mind. I now found myself preparing to answer the siren’s song.

The experience wasn’t all good. I lost my cell phone somewhere on the hill, and because a Missouri State Trooper had stopped to figure out why my car was sitting to the side of the road and what I was doing on the hillside (a passing trucker had reported a potentially stranded motorist) I ended up falling down the hill and tearing some tendons in my right ankle. Long story.

But the exhilaration of climbing that hill was worth it.

I could not explain why I climbed the hill. People call it a bucket list item and I found that insulting, because I don’t have some list of things I want to accomplish before I die. I didn’t plan this consciously, although apparently I was planning it most of my life subconsciously.

I now see the connection. In a sense, I followed my dad’s path, heeding the seductive song and climbing the hill that called to me. I also set out to find my parents figuratively, something I couldn’t do in 1969. I needed to make the trip, conquer the hill, and prove to myself that I really would be okay, just as my mom said I would.

No other challenges beckon me. I had finally made peace with The Hill.