What is it about vacation that makes us long for the days of childhood? Is it the freedom we experience from school and work? Or is it the sense of fleeting you get when you know it will soon be over? For some it is the freedom and for some it is the fleeting, but moreover it is the feeling we get from being trapped in a cage of scheduling and activity. We plan every minute of our day to ensure we get the most of our time. And when a minute goes by without planning you have to compensate by re-exerting yourself at some other point in the day. You feel as though you must make it up or catch up with your schedule. Vacation is a time when schedules become meaningless and time becomes infinite. Your reality is the moment and your future seems far away.

We all need that feeling once in a while. If we do not get it we can be forced to do rash things like binge drink at a weekend party or OD on pain pills after a hard day of work, all in an effort to reach that feeling. Not to be so grim most of today’s college students get more than their fair share of this feeling. They spend each weekend in a mindless stupor hoping they had done their homework the week before. Then they get vacation and decide to spend the little money they did manage to save on a cruse in Jamaica trying to pick up hot Jamaican women and men. In my mind this is an overabundance of that feeling.

There are also some who do it right. They work hard all semester and on weekends do extra curricular activities including community service and clubs/ organizations. They spend their nights doing papers and discussing mind-expanding topics with their friends. So when that vacation comes there are ready. They are ready to get a healthy dose of that euphoric feeling that comes with the schedule free time. They take it in and enjoy its warm embrace and after a logical amount of time they brush it off and go back to work.

That is the way vacations are supposed to work. Unfortunately most people fall in to one of the other groups. They either over-indulge in the euphoria or under-indulge by working through vacations and not spending enough time on themselves.

I fall into the later group I spend every vacation working and trying to get ahead. I take very little time for myself and spend way too much time on every one else. In the past two years I have taken three stress tests and not passed a single one of them. Normally I would say its ok and I will be fine, but as I have just said there is a point where you need to stop and enjoy a little bit of that euphoric feeling that comes with vacation.