The Absorption Vacation

The inverse of "traveling"

Episode 2 of The Culture Study Podcast is here! I talk with Deb Chachra about all things infrastructure and also your pressing questions, like: Why are sidewalks so bad in so many places? What’s the deal with a power company in Vermont distributing a huge battery to every customer? If we can have air conditioners in our STEERING WHEELS why can’t we have good trains?

We're All Infrastructure Nerds

Click here to listen, read the transcript, find the show notes, and participate in a very Culture Study discussion about everything related to our infrastructure hopes and dreams. And here’s a handy link to listen to it on the podcast app of your choice.

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And now, here’s the regular Culture Study newsletter for this mid-week (which will continue to come out like normal — the podcast is an extension of the newsletter, not a replacement for any part of it).

In The Garden, 1902, William Bruce Ellis Ranken, aka “SOME LADIES HAVING A REAL READING VACATION”

A few weeks ago, I worked hard to get everything newsletter-related in order. I polished interviews, finished essays, put together threads — and then I scheduled them to publish at a later date. I did a lot more work so that I could take time truly away from work.

This is how I take vacation now. It’s how a lot of us take vacation now. Because there is no give in the system, no capacity for a slow-down. If you take time off, the work that you would’ve done that week doesn’t disappear. It still needs to get done. It’s just a matter of when.

I’ve tried different strategies to avoid the before-vacation pile-up. I’ve kept half-attached to work. I’ve tried outsourcing it. The best strategy I’ve found is to do a lot of planning so as to spread that work out over the weeks and months before. And you know what, it works. Flexibility is a huge perk of my current self-employment, and I’m grateful I’ve been able to figure out a way to make the workload sustainable in so many ways — including when and if I want to leave that work behind for a bit.

But there’s another secret — not to spreading out the work, but to ensure that I get some time away that feels restful and restorative (and, as a bonus, truly excited to get back to my daily work). This isn’t possible with every break from work — there’s a difference, after all, between a “trip” and a “vacation,” and so much of it has to do with the presence of children, or relatives, or a packed touristy schedule, or the overarching reason for the trip. But it works for me.

I bring way more books than I could possibly read — but I still read a lot of them. I throw myself utterly into the pursuit, which morphs from a task to “what we do here.” Not because I want to “win” or be “productive” at book reading, but because I want to go deep into other worlds — and forget, however temporarily, about mine. I often read a book a day, if not more, and the vast majority of them fiction.

This sort of absorption is only possible when you’re intentional about it. You leave your phone in the other room. You don’t watch a TV show or TikTok before bed. You ignore small messes. You read. You read with your coffee, with your snacks, with your tea, with your cocktail — and then keep reading after dinner. You do it in part because you can’t do it, at least not like this, at any other time.

I’ve done this at the beach. I’ve done this in the woods. I’ve done it at a hotel. I’ve done it with close friends, with my partner, and alone. I’ve done a very close approximation of it in the space where I live, but that took extra intention: there’s always something to attend to when you’re in your own space. It works best in places where there isn’t much else to do, save maybe go on a walk. The island where I live happens to be one of those places, but there are many, many others.

People sometimes call these sorts of vacations “retreats,” but I’m talking about something far less bougie that’s never had the word “workplace” put in front of it. Back when I was in academia, I knew some professors who’d take a long weekend at a cabin for a “writing retreat,” but it was never actually about rest. It was a productivity hack, a way to escape their daily obligations so as to do more work. That can be incredibly useful. But that’s not a vacation.

I should also emphasize that the thing you do on this type of vacation doesn’t have to be reading. Reading is just a placeholder for whatever mode of absorption soothes you most. Not soothes some ideal or imagined version of yourself, but you, as you are. Maybe it’s knitting, or puzzling, or skiing, or hiking, or meditating, or cycling, or baking. What matters is that you create a scenario that allows you to do an abundance of it, a veritable profusion of it, a beautifully satiating amount of it, with as little thought to logistics or meals as possible.

In practice, that entails doing things like eating the same simple dinner three days in a row, or getting take-out, or going to the same reasonable restaurant every day. It means going to a place you know by heart or that requires very little navigation. Not exciting, not different, not Instagrammable, but who cares: that’s not the point. The point is creating the ease of an all-inclusive resort, only much cheaper and in the location of your choosing.

To be clear: an absorption vacation is not the same as traveling. Traveling is devoting yourself to absorbing the world around you. This is about creating more space, more gentleness, more rest — and allowing something else to absorb you. And that’s often not possible if you’re also trying to navigate a new city’s transportation and figure out the best way to experience the local cuisine and get “the most” out of the limited time you have away, all while also attending to the needs and desires of your traveling companions. That’s not this. This is a very different sort of most.

You have to be choosy about who you invite on your absorption vacation. They have to be utterly on the same page. If you want a cozy weekend of reading and maybe, maybe, a puzzle, and they’re the type of person who sits down with a book and needs to move ten minutes later — that’s not the person. If that description describes your partnership, that’s okay! There is no rule that all vacations must be spent with your partner. In fact, perhaps a vacation from your partner would be restorative, too. Find the person who likes to be absorbed similarly so you can engage in what I think of as the adult version of parallel play: absorbed individually, together.

And don’t discount the power of your own absorption to serve as a partner itself. When I’ve done one of these alone and really given myself over to whatever activity it is I’m pursuing, I never feel alone. It’s only when the mind wanders towards what should I be doing instead, and who should I be doing it with that I feel that pang of loneliness. It’s enough to hang out with your own obsessions. What marvelous companions they can be — but only if you really invite them.

If you have young children and feel like this is impossible: chances are very high that someone in your life would love to give you this for at least a night, if not more. But you have to ask. Or, if that’s just not possible in this moment: it will be soon. (If you feel like a caregiver in your life could benefit from this: offer your services). If it still feels out of reach: think of how you can create a similar scenario in your current space. If it feels like you should be taking time off only to do things as a family, that’s wrong. If it feels indulgent, that’s right. You should be generous and lenient with yourself.

We work so hard. All of us, whatever we do, in or outside of an office or the home, taking care of ourselves and others. Most of us like the work that we do — and even if we’re ambivalent about it, we want to be decent at it. That’s true if you’re working a passion job or parenting or providing medical care or writing code. But you need rest from that thing in order to be decent at it. Maybe you’ve always been good at that. Maybe you’re like me and need help (re)learning how to do it — and learning how to take an absorption vacation is a particularly useful tool in that ongoing project.

Maybe you’ve realized that privileging rest alongside work is one of the refrains of this newsletter, and we’re going to keep talking about it until we actually change our own minds about it — and act accordingly. Making this sort of space for rest in our own lives, of course, but also facilitating it in the lives that intersect our own.

This past month, I haven’t felt like I have much to say. Then I went and read my face off and felt a real and renewed astonishment in what words could do. Those books had nothing and everything to do with the work I do here. Same with the vacation itself, like the best absorption vacations — nothing and everything, all at once. ●

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I’d love to hear about your own experiences with absorption vacation. What’s worked, what’s complicated it, what would you not do again, how have you dealt with various circumstances that make getting away difficult….how have you refined the art — for it is an art — over the years?