How I Spent My Summer Vacation…

I remember well having to write paragraphs during the first week of grade school about how I spent my summer vacation, and I bet you do too!

Over the following years, my vacations had gotten shorter. They dropped from three months to a week to three day weekends!

Now from the view of retirement age, I can take as much time as I want. And I find that the lines between work and play often are blurred much of the time. And I think that can be good.

 

When you think of vacation, what words or images come to your mind?

• Europe?
• The beach?
• The mountains?
• The backyard?

Some of my memorable ones from over the years were Ireland, Italy, Sedona. As was camping in the redwoods of California!

Whatever your experiences have been, I hope they served you well as good old R&R (rest and relaxation) experiences.

 

I believe that vacations should involve A LOT or “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 of a vacation can be. 

Re-lax. The original objective of vacation. Lax=loose, open? Sometimes it takes a day or three 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 fallow.

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.

Re-joice. Experience joy again.

 

Yet we all know folks who come home from their vacation saying, “I need a vacation to recover from my vacation.” They either did what they didn’t really want to do or they didn’t do what they did want to do.

Do you have any regrets about what you did or didn’t do?

First of all, what is a regret? The prefix 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.

Remember, refute,  reimburse, react…they all refer (yep, there’s another one)  to something that is already there or happened. So a regret can’t even exist until something has happened!

 

Now there’s a breakthrough for somebody. Want a life without regret? Don’t do anything! Oh wait…then would you look back and regret what you didn’t do? Guess that makes it impossible, doesn’t it?

 

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! 

Would you be willing to share your thoughts?

 

Tags: prefix, re, regret, Stephen King, summer vacation