Best things about being a kid are the many vacation days you get in a year, but the sad reality is that you appreciate the holidays only when you grow up and have to beg for every single leave to your beloved boss. Right now, we are excited for a long weekend consisting of three holidays while then, when we had months together we had no respect for it. Though we thoroughly enjoyed going for villa holidays with our parents and visiting our grandparents and getting our face stuffed with the amazing food our grandma makes, we still never valued the vacation days as much as we would do now.
Adulthood and Holidays:
Life has taken a devious turn and adulthood has grabbed us by our collars and have been dragging us through a path filled with gravel and stones and in this commotion, when villa holidays would be a welcome change all we get is one day to do our load of laundry. Our one sad Sunday goes mostly by thinking “what should be achieved in these 24 hours” and ending in “what can we achieve in just 24 hours, let us just sleep.”
Another thing that we might be missing the most about holidays and otherwise is the responsibilities. As a child the maximum responsibility you had was to wear the dress you mom had put out for you and reluctantly let her comb your hair. Now, even if you use your vacation days, your company would mostly dump you with some kind of work to complete, if by a miracle that doesn’t happen then you are definitely gonna end up with a million errands to run and a thousand loose ends to tie down. It is exhausting and just plain sad.
Priorities:
Our priorities have shifted from family and friends to work and work alone, we run behind the money and the bling it brings. By the time we slow our pace down, it is usually too late, we are either at an age where fun is not as fun anymore or all these years of running behind money has handicapped our ability at a good old fashioned simple existence. It is quite interesting how we are unaware of this as well, we have gelled into the system that was stuffed upon us to the extent that we cannot even see what is actually happening to us and around us. Is this what we signed up for, to live a life where you are hardly alive. One could only hope that we snap out of this trance soon and once again see life for its real marvelous self.
If only we got another chance, another chance at carefree vacations, another chance at a villa life, another chance at hoarding our grandparents food, another chance at just being present, not lost in a million thoughts and responsibilities at one given time. As life moved on, we have had to cope with the existence of taking whatever we get and go in a path that our childhood version hardly recognises.
Let us remember to never let the kid in us die and still catch a carefree breath every once in a while. Let our guards down and indulge ourselves in the various tiny and large possibilities that life throws our way.
Author Alison Lurie