Ilana Friedman, Advanced Clinical Fellow

Summer is the season of sun-warmed skin, the smell of sunscreen and sea breeze, dripping popsicles, and fun vacations. The world seems a little lighter, a little more carefree, during this sensual season. It is as if the earth is urging us to rest and recover before we get into the season of planting seeds and ideas. Rest and recovery are vital, but I have noticed that the older I get, the harder it is for me to be present, relax, and rest on vacation. It’s almost as if I’m so used to being in “go, go, go-mode” that I can’t easily downshift into “just be.”

I recently took a big, long-awaited, once-in-a-lifetime vacation and I made some really intentional choices ahead of time to set myself up for success in being able to be relaxed and present. I hope these ideas can help you get the rest, recovery, and presence you so deserve while on vacation:

• Consciously set the intention to be fully present and (here’s the key!) communicate that intention to friends, family, and work. Enroll your circle with the goal of really getting away, and make sure everyone knows you will not respond to anything non-emergent until you are back.

• Slow down, WAY down. We live lives packed to the brim with appointments, meetings, work, and social engagements. Being on vacation gives us the chance to spend a long afternoon sipping coffee in an outdoor cafe and watching the world go by. It is so alluring to pack a trip in the same way we pack our normal schedules so as not to miss anything. Try to build in bigger chunks of time and leave enough flexibility for adventures! The most meaningful travel memories aren’t the museum tours, they are the times when you go off script, have an adventure, and allow a new place to show itself to you in an organic, unstructured way.

• Set a vacation response on your personal email, not just on your work email. It is fairly

  standard practice to set one on a work email, but setting one on your personal email as

  well is a gamechanger!

• Turn off notifications and keep your phone on airplane mode. It is impossible to resist the ding of notification, the siren song of the mindless scroll, but what beauty or magical moment are you missing when you are looking at your phone instead of the world around you? Make it easy on yourself and get rid of the temptation!

• Make a conscious choice about how often you want to check email and/or social media. For this trip, I chose once at breakfast and once before dinner and that really worked for me. You can do more or less; find what works for you and stick with it.

• Engage with people. The best way to get your attention off yourself (and your work email) is to get it on someone else. Say hello to the person next to you in line, ask people where they are from, and chat with the waiter. You never know where these connections can lead!

• Get out from behind the camera! We live in a time where we are expected to document every moment but are you fully experiencing the world if you are solely looking through a phone or a tiny viewfinder? Pictures are an amazing way to capture a vacation, but don’t forget to experience it as well!

• Be kind to yourself! I find the first couple of days of a trip to be the hardest. My body is so used to a crazy pace that I almost feel like I’m doing something wrong by slowing down. In those moments, take a breath, look around you and engage with your surroundings, and repeat to yourself “just be.” You deserve to slow down, rest, to recover and this is just your body shedding its habitual way of being.

Travel allows us to shake things up, experience the world in a more engaged and present way, and rest and recover. If we are intentional, vacations can help us reset and hopefully bring some of that luxurious slow pace into our daily lives so, even in our everyday life, we can just be.