Serendipity

Work is love made visible.

And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit in the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.

For if you bake bread with indifference, you bake a bitter bread that feeds but half a man's hunger.

And if you grudge the crushing of the grapes, your grudge distills a poison in the wine.

And if you sing though as angels, and love not the singing, 

you muffle man's ears to the voices of the day and the voices of the night.

-Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

A peculiar thing to stumble across a reflection on work as I return from vacation.  The thing is though, vacation can seem like work, especially when family is involved.  We went camping with the in-laws, at the Jersey shore, which has steadily sunk down the list of places I want to spend my leisure time and now hovers somewhere around the level of reading a poorly written novel and slightly above having dental work done.  It's not that the Jersey shore is objectively terrible, lot's of people seem to like it, and that is essentially where my problems begin, it is a pretty crowded place.

I may not share the atheist existentialism of Jean Paul Sartre, but I absolutely share his diagnosis that "Hell is other people," particularly people who rub you the wrong way, maybe even some family members.  Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to shoot at my in-laws, it's not that sort of problem. I have this need to be alone sometimes, or at least alone with Michele and the kids, and vacations of the sort that we have been practically forced into over the past decade or so, leave no room for that at all, and so they seem like work.

That is essentially the attitude I took into last week, it was work.  I had to pack the car, I had to drive, I had to set up camp, cook food, be sociable, and tolerate the bugs and the crowds, then I had to tear down camp, pack the car again and drive home.  Fortunately for me, except the driving parts, I was able to drink beer pretty steadily throughout the process.

You know what? It worked out pretty well.  I did not treat it like it was some sort of hallowed sabbath.  It treated it like I had a job to do, and I tried to do that job with as much joy as a I could.  I think we get the mistaken notion that working in joy means you are always happy and everything goes as it should.  Work implies something that is challenging, physically, mentally and maybe even spiritually.  As one of my favorite TV Dads told his son: "That's why they call it work and not super-happy-fun-time."

Any time I have treated these excursions to the Jersey shore as though they were supposed to be relaxing and restorative, I have become frustrated and angry and generally made things unpleasant for myself and others.  I told myself that wasn't going down this time around.  I didn't try to make things just so, I didn't take my surfboard or anything of that nature.  I took a chair to sit in and the things necessary for camp life.  I didn't try to vanish off down the beach for some brooding walk where I let grief and sadness get the best of me. I did the Dad thing.  I took the kids to the beach and to the pool to let them do kid things, dig holes and play in the surf as much as the oh-so-attentive Avalon Life Guards would let them.  They're both on the edge of teenagedness so there aren't going to be too many more years of that stuff left I don't imagine.  Pretty soon they will be trying to "hang" with friends and generally be too cool for family time.

So I did my work, and the work happened to be called "vacationing."  I don't generally go in for the God helps those who help themselves mentality, it's bad theology, but I did feel like a lot of things got blessed in the midst of everything. The weather broke and cooler temperatures prevailed, good news for tent camping.  It only rained for a minute, and that at night when we were snug in our tent. The camp set up nicely and in a good spot.  Being there mid-week meant less traffic and less crowds, and the kids behaved themselves pretty well. Then we went home, and I got three days of real sabbath time, including a perfect trip to the Shenandoah river to float on a tube for four hours.  I feel adequately vacationed, something that I have not felt for quite some time.

It was worth the effort.