Monday, September 08, 2008

The Vacation:
It's time to break from the pack and itch at our creative claustrophobia. It’s my time to reflect and dream up ideas that have been sitting dormant and release the angst that has been building up. We reach for expansiveness-- whether it be the great outdoors or a window for our contained imagination. We hope for the best, but know it’s hard to unplug from daily reality.

The only problem with vacations is there are many more ideas and dreams of what’s to be done and accomplished than there is time. Never factored in is down-time and what is finally your time. All the time in cubicles, under hard hats and in suits has gotten you nowhere- not even a confidence booster. So squeezed into small vacations—often only 2 days or into late, late nights is your freedom to create your being and map your essence. It’s where you drop your pin prick of a mark on this fragile space of time—not a big one, but at least it’s something real and original- something to be built upon in the next generation.

Like working with toothpicks of time, we create and build forms, shapes and homes. These house bigger ideas and bigger life forms that seep out into the world and hopefully gain some recognition, influence or notice publicly. We have to work fast and efficiently ‘cause we are working with slivers of time and slivers of budgets just to do what we’re meant to do. Perhaps it is just experimenting at first, which is always risky because it takes so much time to “play” and it often times leads to dead-ends, but you know the impact of what might be. It’s nothing without practice and play. Like a dog hunting down a scent you don’t know where it will lead but you taste it.

Without risk or vacation from the norm, you’re simply a robot of someone else’s creation, which often times, that too, is just a form of paper-white dull play with larger budgets and no imagination. When will vacations be a vital, necessary and demanded part of our standard of living- a life force that has to be revived frequently before we can be an upstanding human being of real purpose?