Too often, we spend our time and energy trying to escape what we think of as reality, but the fact is that we create our reality.
Vacation is a funny concept. We work hard all year long, living our lives in a way that we find tolerable at best. Then, once or twice a year, we try to escape this life by fleeing or ‘vacating’ it to some place we imagine is better than what we have at home.
We treat our everyday lives as a burden that we someday hope to escape. Vacation, we imagine, is a luxury, some extravagant adventure, far removed from the toil and drudgery of work and responsibility. We save up our money, we save up our time, and then binge-experience what we think ‘the good life’ must be like.
As our vacation comes to an end, as we begin to imagine the life we must face when we go back home, the remorse sets in. We start to mourn the loss of joy we will experience when we wake up on the first day of our ‘real life’ after our vacation has ended. Before we even step into our home, we begin fantasizing about our next vacation, saddened by the fact that it will come no time soon.
There is a major problem with this approach to life, however. We do not need more, better vacations. We need fuller, better lives.
We need lives that we are proud of living, lives we do not yearn to vacate, and daily experiences that bring us the same amount of joy and fulfillment we imagine we will find on vacation. In every, seemingly trivial moment, we must create for ourselves a reality so full of amazement and wonder that there is no reason to ‘get away’ because we are happy to be whereever we are.
Holistic Budo: As it is in budo, so too it is in life. As it is in life, so too it is in budo.
Robert Van Valkenburgh is co-founder of Taikyoku Mind & Body and Kogen Dojo where he teaches Taikyoku Budo and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu
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