How did YOU spend your summer vacation?
Do you remember having to write about how you spent your summer vacation back in grade school? I do!
Over the years my vacations had gotten shorter…from those couple of months to a week to three-day-weekends.
Now from the view of retirement, I can take as much time as I want. I find that the lines between work and play are often blurred and I think that can be good.
I hope that whatever your experiences have been, that they served you well as good old R&R (rest and relaxation) experiences. I believe that our vacations should involve A LOT of “re,” that prefix that means “again or anew.” (ex-English teacher speaking here!)
Let me share with you a few more “re” words, so you too can see what the scope of opportunity a vacation can be.
- Re-lax. The original objective of vacations. Lax=loose, open? Sometimes it takes a day or two to get into a real relaxed mode.
- Re-juvenate. Get your youthful thinking and feeling back.
- Re-vive. Decide what you want to bring back to life.
- Re-store. Build back physical and mental strength that may have gone missing.
- Re-flect. Pause to think about people and things.
- Re-cover. Heal both mentally and physically -both by doing (exercise) and not doing (nap, beach).
- Re-lieve. Take time to let stress go, and thereby welcome new and better thoughts
- Re-vel. Love what you do. Love what you’re doing. Love who you’re becoming. Love who you are. And wallow in it while you relax.
- Re-creation. A time used to create ourselves again.
And my two current favorites are Re-new. To become new again. and Re-joice. Experience joy again.
So what is a re-gret? The prefix re puts it in its place right away. When we see that re at the beginning of a word we do know that things can be headed backward.
Re-member, re-fute, re-imburse, re-act…they each re-fer (yep, there’s another one) to something that is already there or has previously happened.
Ah well, we all know that we can’t give what we don’t have. We know that we need to re-fill our bucket or glass in order to re-store our energy, clarity, peace, and joy. No regrets for doing this!
So if you did take some time this summer to re-group, to re-fresh, and to perhaps even re-examine your life, then congratulations!
I’d love to know what you think about all this!