I have now, rather unfortunately, decided that I don’t know what it would be like to take a vacation. I don’t understand the concept, not in the least. In the other world, the corporate world with secretaries and board rooms and parking garages, I wonder what a vacation from that is like. Is it fun? Does it even exist? Or is it as I suspect, a constant juggle of work obligations and family pressures, even though the email response is set to vacation mode. I’m on vacation, it’ll say, but it won’t mean that. Because people have already sent the email by the time they receive the response, and then you’ve already read the email while pretending to be on vacation. Your response to their inquiry is unavoidable. This is vacation today, and it’s downright terrible.
Vacation from real estate business would be easy if one had no business to worry about. If an agent who seldom sells wishes to go away, that’s no big deal. Go away, and no one will care. But when you’re in the middle of deals at all times of all months, of all years, how does a vacation occur? Is it a vacation if you just take work and do it from another location? If that location has unreliable cell service and only a bit of internet access, is the vacation truly a vacation or is it a place where you have to struggle more even while accomplishing less? Why must we always be accomplishing something? When do we get to go somewhere for a bit and ignore all the rest?
I don’t think there is such a thing as a vacation anymore. I think there are moments, brief windows where we can rest, but in real estate that doesn’t mean a Sunday night and it doesn’t mean a Monday morning and so I’m left wondering what it does mean. Or do we just work and work and then when we’ve decided that we can’t work anymore, either through fatigue of a mental or a physical nature, we then just give up and retire. We don’t have enough money to do that, but do that we must. This is why people move to Alaska and build log cabins with their bare hands and then end up eaten by a hungry grizzly bear. At least they died doing what they loved, not working.
There is no vacation anymore, but a friend of mine was in California last week and he sent photos of hipster coffee shops and of a big red suspension bridge. How was he on this vacation? Does he know something I don’t know? He seemed to be enjoying himself, but if I were driving in that car on that big red bridge I’d be texting and driving and my wife would yell at me for that and then what difference would it make if I were on that bridge or on Highway 50 passing Pesche’s? Another friend is off to another state this week, his whole family in tow. I don’t think he’ll get to ignore his work responsibilities while he’s there, but he has people who work for him so he can tell those people what to do and hopefully they’ll do it. If I’m going away, there’s no one to tell things to. There’s no one who can do these things I do, and it’s not because they’re hard. It’s just because the explanation of the status and of the process is more difficult than taking phone calls all day while in some other place. It’s just easier to keep working.
So this week, I’ll be gone for two days. 48 hours, give or take. It’ll be a vacation, but it won’t be. I’ll just be somewhere else with a phone and a computer and I’ll be trying to do something else but I’ll just be there working. In that, I suppose is the value of a lake house. Grind out the work week and then try to recharge during the weekend. It’s just that in real estate there is no grind during the week and rest on the weekend, there’s mostly grind during the week and grind on the weekend, but sometimes you get to go superjetting at 3 on a Tuesday afternoon because the sun is high and the water 80, and I suppose in that there is a rare reward. Summer is fleeting, take off work. Come up here, do your work from a white pier or a floating boat. Just do something different because we deserve it. We work too much, and it’s only getting worse. I think I deserve it, and so I’ll see you in a few days, after I’m done fishing small streams with a Helios in one hand and a cell phone in the other.