Doing or Being?
Posted by Arwen Mosher in Family on Tuesday, October 12, 2010 10:48 PM
We’ve been on vacation since last week, and we are having such a relaxing time.
The first time I went on vacation with a family other than my own, I was fifteen. It shocked me to discover that my friend’s family did a big activity on every single day of their trip. For us, vacationing meant spending entire afternoons reading or playing games or running around outside. We’d do one or two sightseeing jaunts in a week, but for the most part it was all very laid back, and we liked it that way. It had honestly never occurred to me that there was a different, more intensive, way to do it.
After marrying my husband, I discovered that his family are also vacation-doers. It was hard for me, a vacation-relaxer, to adjust to. Fortunately, it turns out that Bryan is also a vacation-relaxer at heart, so we’ve got a good groove with our own little family. Day-to-day life is busy and exhausting, so when we have time off as a family, we prefer to take it easy.
Today is day six of our vacation and we’ve had only three short-ish outings so far. There has been plenty of book-reading, backyard-playing, tower-building, toy-ball-rolling time. I can tell that all of us are feeling better and happier than we were last week.
But I don’t think that vacation-relaxing is better than vacation-doing. I think it just depends on your personal or family preferences. For our family at this point, organizing outings is stressful and often doesn’t add value to our vacation time. For some other people I know, it’s much more stressful not to have anything planned. My father-in-law, for instance, seems happiest when he knows he’s got something to fill every hour between dawn and bedtime. That relaxes him. Reading relaxes me. We’re just different.
What about you? Are you instinctively a vacation-doer or a vacation-relaxer? What’s your family’s dynamic?
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