Vacation is great for clearing the head. The first clear thought is that the US has made a crazy mess of its employment situation whereby a lot of people can’t find work and others have so much work they are told they can’t take much vacation. Most workers aren’t making enough to travel a lot anyway and others are making so much they have their own jets.
Returning from vacation is great for clogging the head back up again. Consider me re-clogged. I saw some Greek temples last week. The real, old ones, as opposed to the newish ones in DC. They put some things in perspective, but I’m having trouble now recalling what that perspective was. They stood atop a high arid ridge overlooking the non-wine-colored, non-dark sea, as they have for thousands of years, on a blazingly hot summer’s day, interrupted only by increasing cloudiness, wind, lightning, a pounding thunderstorm, and maybe some hail. You figure out the metaphors, I’m jet-lagged.
The temples are stunningly beautiful still, though, and beauty is a reward of its own. But it is impossible to appreciate their beauty independently of thinking about the people who built them, and those people are gone. Long gone. The gods they built them to honor, interestingly, are gone too. Something to think about there. Thunder bolt. Zeus, is that you?
It’s all a quite sad beauty of time passed, and passing. Makes life seem short. Everybody says life is short, but they don’t act like it is. Want evidence? How much of it do you waste? Apparently it’s long enough that we can waste most of it. Try not to waste it all. Do something beautiful. Maybe it will last a while.