Robert Rowland Smith on Getting Away From It All

I know people who spend fifty weeks of the year thinking about their holidays, and two weeks on them. Surely they’d be better off making their daily life more tolerable, so there’s less pressure on that precious fortnight. What if it rains or you’re ill? You can’t fantasise about getting away from it all without some level of discontent with your usual existence. As Freud once remarked, only unhappy people have fantasies. Happiness is not wanting to leave. 

Perhaps that’s harsh. Even workaholics need a break, if only to return refreshed to work. And yet this implies that getting away isn’t getting away so much as refuelling. To do it properly, you’ ve got to go somewhere where the link with your normal routine is properly broken. And this means the trick of getting away from it all might be less physical than mental. After all, there are people who take their Blackberries or iPhones on holiday, and because technology conquers space, it’s as if they never left home. Even if you are chewing olives and slurping Chianti in the hills of Tuscany, it’s hard not to look at a work email. Getting away from it all means getting away from it all, not just the office. 

On these grounds, it should be possible to get away from it all without getting away. If it’s a mental state, you can unplug while still surrounded by the hurly-burly of your routine. This involves travelling to those spaces inside the mind that are the equivalent of the undiscovered tourist destination. Spaces where you can find an inner quiet. And if that sounds too new-age, you’re not required to meditate on eternal verities. No, the space within your head is so large it contains all your memories of the past and all your images of the future. Think of it as a parallel world you can enter that’s far more colourful and full of possibility than your everyday reality.

People often get away in order to have more time to think. But thinking doesn’t require a plane ticket, nor does it take very long. Getting away from it all can be achieved with just a little more introspection.

Robert Rowland Smith is the author of  'Breakfast with Socrates'.

Comments

[Heidi Barnes]

That's the opposite of the virtual travel company "Recall" in Schwarznegger's film "Total Recall" , where you could have memory implants as if you had been on holiday to Mars without going further than the company labs . I would accept the memory implants & not accept the memory wipe/ destroyed pictures of the real holiday because it is real to me if I remember it & I'm paying for it .
Hurricaneheidi

[Karen Pine]

Absolutely agree! Instead of living for a two-week annual holiday perhaps we should analyse what we love about holidays and try to incorporate those things into our daily lives? If it's lying reading a good book all morning, trying exotic food, learning about a different culture, chatting with new people - we can do more of this if we choose to.
OK we can't create sunshine but even the weather is a state of mind sometimes.
As a psychologist I love Dan Kahneman's take on this - he says it's the memory rather than the experience of a holiday that make us happy.
As a thought experiment he asks would you refuse a holiday if at the end of it your photos were destroyed and you were given an amnesic drug? Is looking forward to our holiday actually just anticipated memories?
I recommend his Ted talk http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/daniel_kahneman_the_riddle_of_experience_vs_memory.html