You’ve been working very very hard, haven’t you? Poor thing, I know exactly how you feel.
You know what you need? You need a little vacation. Go ahead — take a some time off. Relax.
How you relax is a gorgeous variegated menu, splayed before you. Beach or Basque country, staycation or one-tank-trip motervation, mountain climbing or ego tripping, or all the above, you get to choose how to burn up your precious days off.
May I humbly suggest you shoehorn some culture in there?
Your definition of ‘culture’ is as happily elastic as your ‘vacation.’ Embrace it as ye please, but grab hold of something — art, literature, cinema, fingerpainting — something that’s capable of capturing the imagination of at least two dreamers that you know of — you and the artist — and probably millions and billions of others. Who knows a thousand or hundred thousand or hundred million of them might be simultaneously enjoying their own vacation, or maybe their couple days off, and are opting to spend it, like you are, with a classic novel, a terrifying artist, and a kind of music you didn’t know existed. And who knows what else.
Doesn’t matter who you are, where you come from, or what drively job you’re vacationing from, you’ve got a mind and your mind’s like all minds: hungry. Feed it culture and you know good stuff will happen.
No one’s suggesting of course that culture-embrace, however you do it, has to be reserved for two weeks in July or some long weekend in the Fall. Perish that thought, and patron the arts year round. Just know that special heart-felt immersion in the arts is possible only on days you’re not punching some other schmuck’s clock. This holds true for everyone, everywhere, always, amen.
You’re going to take some time off work anyway. (You’re going to have to. Or you’ll explode.) You’re going to spend it how you’re going to spend it.
You could spend some of that time at a gallery or museum, or a book fair or any kind of show, or anywhere the creativity of you and others lead you. That certainly wouldn’t be the worst way to spend a bit of vacation.
Knowing then that in the worst of all possible worlds you’d be spending worthwhile time, and in the best you’d feed your starving brain-maw and open up who the hell knows what kind of literal and metaphorical doors — can you afford not to give it a try?
Seriously. Take your vacation, and swim in some culture.
