Weekend Magic
The subtle power of gaining perspective.
Gaining perspective requires the humility to step back and consider a thing afresh.
You must remove yourself from the frame and see with your eyes and your full imagination. The imagination used to be viewed as the prime engine for reasoning, data gathering of the senses, emotions, and creative sense-making.
We can’t gain perspective when we limit any of these aspects. Think about how you might limit your perspective during the day.
Now think about how all your days pile on top of each other. When we don’t take breaks for breathing—and I mean breathing with our souls and lungs—we can lose perspective.
The Vacation Perspective
I just returned from the South Carolina coast with my family. We spent a week embracing a different daily rhythm. During our vacations, I take each of my lovely ladies on solo bike rides. We explore and chat along the way.
When I asked one of my daughters what she loved most about vacations, she said, “I love getting out of the stress that comes with always being at home—the neighborhood, the schooling, the routine.”
Now, my daughters love their neighborhood and schooling, and they love the routine of volleyball practice and taekwondo. So, my daughter’s comment was about doing different and new things for a time, seeing new places, and changing our usual rhythm.
As a family, we discuss these kinds of things. The girls enjoy articulating what they love about beach trips. And most of what they love is the simplicity of it, the margin in the day, and the concentrated time of being together with zero interruptions.
Our bodies and souls need the change a vacation brings. We need time away from our friends, family, church communities, neighborhoods—all of it.
But it’s not just the time away. It’s also what we do with the time. And it’s what we do in the time.
We invite a beautiful silence into our lives when we seek the joy of “being unoccupied,”—which is the historical Latin definition of vacation.
How can we enrich this time of being unoccupied? What actions can we take to gain a new perspective and feel revitalized when we return from vacation?