Post Holiday Vacuum

Sometimes you hear your own footsteps duplicating your path through the house. It’s as though you have company but you glance over your shoulder and there’s no-one there. When you stop walking the soundless vacuum fills your ear drums with deafening silence.

When you return home from a holiday that’s filled with wonderful sound; bat on ball, chair scrapes, exclamations, giggles, stair climbing, floor creaking, careful whispering, generic chatting; your previously warm hearth, comfort, your home, becomes fleetingly clinical, stark, and folds its asylum arms as you enter. You feel alien and unwelcome in your own abode.

Time away from home, from work, is a prescription that you can’t get fulfilled at the pharmacy, but it’s often more effective than any of the drugs that stuff the shelves. You blow out your stale, fatigued breath and inhale, light, laughter, love, living! The treacle of thoughts that have rendered each crevice in your brain impassable become diluted and rapidly replaced with blue sky creativity. The daily laughter replaces your gym workout endorphins, the fresh scene that greets you when you open the curtains each morning resets the “I’m getting bored” switch to “I feel energised”, the removal of a home-based list of tasks is replaced by an adventurous, toe-dipping day without a certain start or an end. Your body tingles with daily exhilaration. You also gain the clarity to recognise what to do with people, things, stuff that might need some re-evaluation and you draw a web of ideas on your internal white-board. By the end of your holiday you may be full of carbs, sugar, alcohol, but your soul feels more cleansed and detoxed than after any spa weekend.

Life before holiday wasn’t necessarily drab, grey, limp but the contrast between peak holiday joy and the return home vacuum, can make it feel that way. Following my recent holiday, I’ll therefore allow the stagnant water to briefly submerse me and then I’ll pull the plug and refill my tank with rainbow crammed ideas to load the work and life weeks to come. I’ll revisit the hastily drawn web on my internal white-board and get those check boxes ticked for the stuff, things, people and I’ll plan and dream about the next time I can book a laughter-filling, toe-dipping, fresh day breathing time away from home and fill my soul with the reverie until it once again becomes a reality.