Praise for Vacation
Simone Riva - Many people have or will go on vacation in the next few weeks. What prevents this habit from leaving a bitter taste in our mouths?
In recent weeks, many people have gone on or are going on vacation. But what prevents this from becoming a habit that leaves a bitter taste in the mouth? We know, in fact, that vacation time seems to pass quickly, and soon it is back to life as usual, with all the burdens it brings. Fr. Giussani wrote: "Work expresses life as life, it clutters the whole of life. Work in the strict sense - going to a certain place or committing oneself to certain actions for which one is responsible and for which one receives a reward that allows one to live - occupies life more than rest, more than sleep. Here, work and rest compete for the space of life.
This combination is quite impressive (impressive in the right sense of the word), because it is precisely man who is divided between an amount of inertia and an amount of energy. Work, however, competes with sleep for the primacy of occupying all the hours of our life" (Exercises for Young Workers, Varigotti, May 2, 1964).
Vacation is a tiny part of what we experience throughout the year. And yet, for so many of us, it is the most anticipated part. For "it is not a having to do, but a having to be. Vacation is the time of freedom, not as a liberation from study, but because it forces the effort and responsibility of freedom and sincerity. It is when what you really want begins to surface. There is in me the presence of something as real as the sea and the mountains. I am still myself. The time of vacation is the time of personality" (Fr. Luigi Giussani, Notes from a Ray, June 9, 1962).
The possibility of taking time during the year to be with ourselves, without having to prove anything to anyone, to live the days in the company of what is most important to us, with the people who are most important to us, are, I think, some of the reasons that make us long for vacations. In a sense, they are an appointment with the truth of who we are. Before it is in doing, it is in being.
This unmasks the discomfort some feel in taking them. If they could, they would be working all the time; they are only good when producing and achieving. They have not looked at themselves with gratitude and wonder for a long time, and perhaps they are not even looked at. They make and brig all day long and consider rest a waste of time. But God Himself, in creation, wanted the time of rest. It is the time of our resizing, in which we check where we get the energy to live all the rest of our activities.
Fr. Giussani provokes again in one of his dialogues with young people: "What a person - young or adult - really wants, I understand not from work, from study, that is, from what he is obliged to do, from convenience or social needs, but from how he uses his free time. If a young or mature person squanders his leisure, he does not love to live: he is foolish. In fact, vacation is the classic time when almost everyone becomes foolish.
On the contrary, vacation is the noblest time of the year because it is the time when one either engages, as one wishes, with the value that one recognizes as dominant in one's life, or one engages with nothing at all and then, precisely, one is foolish" (Traces, July-August 1997).
The very gestures of choosing where to go, using economic resources, packing our bags, and planning our departure... tell of a rush within us that silently cries out the urgency of rediscovering why we live. Does this only happen when we are on vacation? Certainly not, but they are the natural habitat for reexamining what we want. How wonderful it would be if we did not miss the deadline.
The translation of the article has not been revised by the author. Source: ilsussidiario.net.
Download.
