I used to take work with me.
Not always visibly. Sometimes the work was in the laptop I packed and opened at the hotel desk on the second evening because I had told myself I would just check in on a few things, because the inbox did not understand that I was away, because there was always a student, a committee, a deadline that had the particular quality of being slightly more urgent than my presence at the beach. I brought the work to every vacation I took for twenty years and the vacation contained the work the way a jar contains water, everywhere, filling every available space.
I did not bring work on this trip.
I want to say that plainly because it sounds small and it was not small. I packed a bag and there was no laptop in it. There was no folder of things I was going to get to. There was nothing in the bag that was for anyone else. There were clothes and a book and the phone that I agreed with myself to use only for photographs and the occasional message to let people know I was alive and well, which they were capable of inferring but I have not yet reached the point of not telling people I am alive and well because the habit of being available is deeply embedded and I am working on it.
On the third day something shifted.
I was sitting at the edge of the water in the late afternoon and I noticed that I was not thinking about anything in particular. Not planning. Not reviewing. Not composing the email I would send when I got back or rehearsing the conversation I needed to have or calculating what the next three weeks required of me. I was just sitting at the edge of the water watching the light move and the pelicans doing whatever pelicans do with their enormous unhurried bodies and I was, for a stretch of time I could not have measured, entirely present.
I did not know I had forgotten what that felt like until I felt it.
Twenty years of vacations that were not quite vacations, of rest that was not quite rest, of presence qualified by the background hum of everything still waiting. And then this. This afternoon. These pelicans. This particular quality of light that I was, for once, actually there to see.
I am going back next year. I am not bringing the laptop next year either.
