Nature in my backyard

Harry Scherer
Class of 2022

(6/2021) "You need a vacation." This normative claim can serve as a sharp response to an uptight coworker or an indication of gratitude for an overworked boss. What are we really suggesting for these people, though?

To answer this question, it would make sense to look to the meaning of the word "vacation." Your sensitivity for etymology is keen if you spot a root in the verb "to vacate." The noun vacation indeed comes from this verb, which comes from the Latin "vacare," which means "to be empty, free, or at leisure."

We provide this suggestion of a vacation, then, for those whom we perceive are overly filled, constrained, or busy to recognize their own freedom. At the end of every academic year, I am content with the goals that I have accomplished, due in large part to the guidance and support of my friends, family, and mentors. At the same time, and especially now as I near graduation, I have become more grateful for and more intent on carving out time for vacation.

I am not planning on booking any flights or reserving any hotel rooms; I do not think the opportunity to vacate necessarily demands any sort of monetary investment. Instead, vacation, that state philosophers refer to as "leisure," is made available any time or day with the people that God has given us.

For example, I have found this unique opportunity of writing monthly for page 35 of the Emmitsburg News-Journal to be a regular opportunity for vacation. Every month, I am forced (not in a coercive way) to sit down, retreat from my typical duties, and reflect on whatever I have asked myself and the other writers to reflect on. While I write, there typically arise other mini-vacations within the process of writing. Today, I sit in my backyard and find myself distracted by the royal plumage of the blue-headed blackbirds contending for a spot on the newly replenished birdbath. I look up at the blue sky sprinkled with spatters of lazily floating white clouds. I attempt to draw from my short cigarillo and realize that these pleasant distractions required too much time for the weak flame to stay alive.

This precious time of rest allows my heart rate to decrease, my shoulders to relax, and my concern for the very time of day to diminish. This sort of rest serves as a sort of acknowledgment that "this is good." An acknowledgment of this kind seems to be possible while working, but the very activity of work typically seems to get in the way of such an affirmation. Both of my parents regularly refer to the sort of contemplation I described as "nature in my backyard." I have to come recently think of this description as a delightful confirmation that the escape of a vacation is accessible within the apparent confines of typical experience.

I wonder how this understanding relates to our modern criteria of a good vacation. If the modern conception requires an account of money spent, activities accomplished, and places seen, the two accounts seem to me to be largely incompatible. There might be a substantial difference between scheduling a meeting for work and scheduling a guided tour of some historical landmark, although I’m not sure what that difference is. My experiences of running late to a scheduled engagement and desiring to move on from that engagement to the next one are varied and frequent enough; it seems that taking part in that desire while on "vacation" is at best paradoxical.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve taken part in and enjoyed these sorts of high-activity excursions with family and friends. I look back on them fondly and at the time I considered them to be fun and, in almost every case, memorable. I look forward to taking part in these sorts of activities in the future, possibly with people I have not yet met. It deserves consideration, though, whether these petal to the metal moments of activity properly qualify as vacation. If the two understandings do not relate to one another in any meaningful way, what does that mean for the way we plan vacation and rest? I think that varies from person to person and family to family; ultimately, it is a matter of prudence. There seems to be something wrong, though, if we are not just working to rest, as we should be, but working at rest.

With my former description of rest, it is no wonder why the beach is so frequently related to our conception of vacation. Rest at the beach is an engagement with nature and a very literal attainment to the end of our physical life. A beach is an experience of sense: we hear the waves crashing, see the gulls flying, taste the salt lingering, smell the sea aerosols blowing, and feel the sand sticking. This attachment to the physical world provides for an escape, an emptiness that we find much more difficult to attain in the work of every day.

Just because we find this engagement with nature more difficult, though, does not mean that such a relationship further from shore is impossible. On the contrary, vacation, and especially the true kind of formal vacation with nature, can serve as a necessary reminder for the sort of attention that is owed to our relationship with the natural world as God’s creation. On vacation, we are granted the unique freedom to look up to the sky, for which light is daily given and from which it is just as frequently taken away. At the same time, we feel the ground, rooted immovably under our feet as a sign of permanence and continuance. We see the leaves blowing in the trees, an occurrence that has, is, and will continue to endure through our joys and sorrows. We hear the birds chirping, that recognizable sound that my parents heard on the day of my birth and my children will hear on the day of my death. All of these gifts are the gifts of vacation that we can experience with nature in our backyard.

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