Vacation...Vocation...



A Panoramic shot of Emerald Bay of Lake Tahoe, from the Upper Eagle Falls Trail




Vacation....Vocation.... The Ying to My Yang

For two words to be so close to each other they couldn't be further apart, at least in my book that is. (Now I am sure some of you English majors are going to tell me that they are indeed very closely related in both etymology and when they were first used)

Vacation:    Middle English vacacioun, from Anglo-French vacacion, from Latin vacation-, vacatio freedom, exemption, from vacare

First Known Use: 14th century

mology and meaning 

Vocation : Middle English vocacioun, from Anglo-French vocaciun, from Latin vocation-, vocatio summons, from vocare to call, from vox voice

First Known Use: 15th century

As you noticed both words have been around for a long time and have almost identical origins and they both show up in written text around the same time. I would, for the record, would like to point out that the word vacation appeared a full hundred years before vocation. So even in the Dark Ages in Europe people were vacationing, or maybe just thinking about leaving the filth infested city they were living in to escape the Black Death... That is a vacation I could really get on board with :) 

Peacock Bass, Rio Negro Amazonas, December 2000

As spring  is right around the corner and many colleges and schools are gearing up for spring break I thought it appropriate to talk about vacation versus vocation. While both are important and mostly you cant have one without the other, there is a fine line and upset the balance and weird stuff starts happening to people.  I am a classic example, do I go on a lot of vacations? Yes, Yes  I do, but I also work very hard and put in long hours, so there is a balance.  Then on the other end of the spectrum you have people who work hard and put in long hours and then don't take their vacation, or worse yet they feel guilty taking vacation ( there is some seriously flawed logic in that kind of thinking).

Vacation is a HUGE part of our culture and while you look around and one of your co-workers is either coming back from or leaving on vacation. Its what gets you through those rough winter days when you know Cancun is just few short months away, or you dream of a warm day on a Canadian lake in the summer instead of a blistering Texas summer day. Think of the billions of dollars in productivity that are lost every year to people searching for places to get away from there job, if just for a bit. (They say that the NCAA tourney distracts people from work! Think  about vacation, not everybody likes basketball, but EVERYBODY likes vacation!) 

With all of the talk of vacation and planing websites and tourism websites and everything else travel related that we have here in America it would stand to reason that Americans get more vacation than most other countries on average. In fact it is quite the opposite , sadly so... The list linked there shows the top countries and the US. Italy tops the list with 40 some days, my friends in Brazil average 34 a year, and even our Canadian neighbors and the industrious Japanese get nearly twice the vacation as us Americans. I came across an article while doing a little research, it states that Americans lost over 60 BILLION dollars on unused or untaken vacation in a year!!! Are you KIDDING ME!!! Reading that may me physically ill, to think that people let there hard earned vacation just disappear, it just beyond my level of comprehension.  



Summit of Mt. Kilimanjaro  December , 2004



I am not  by any means trying to turn this blog into a socio-political commentary on health care, but i feel that this point needs to be made. So all you see around you are people stressed at work, people worked to the bone, people so stressed that they come into work with machine guns and open fire. Heart disease and stress related ailments like depression and anxiety are more rampant than ever, marriages are failing at record levels. Yet we leave billions of  dollars of vacation on the table, never to be enjoyed....That might be the saddest thing I have ever heard.  I think about the vacation I could have with one ten-millionth of that number and it makes me giddy with excitement.  I honestly can't think of a better health care plan than to give people mandatory paid vacation, I mean if we could get people on board with this it would reduce stress related illness, therapy visits, an countless other benefits.  If we could possibly pump another 20 billion into the travel industry it would make it cheaper for those of us that are using all of our vacation every year.  Vacation could be the answer... I know that for a fact, I am healthier and happier than those people that don't use their vacation each year. 

I hear of those people who have gone entire careers without taking a day of vacation and those people fall into one of two categories. The first is a sad sad group of people, the ones who cant afford to take a day off / those who don't want to go anywhere.  The second group I can honestly say that I hope to be part of someday. It is that group of people whose vocation, is what they would be doing on vacation.

Now I understand that some people would say that if you got to say..  go  sport fishing  everyday,  you would eventually get sick of it, or you got to travel the world taking photos, or filming a nature documentary. I would look at those people and say two words "PROVE IT"  Now, I am stating direct facts but I would venture to say that the stress levels and suicide rates of  fishing guides and investment bankers are about as different as night and day.  They say that if you love your job you'll never work again a day in your life... I would like to take that a step forward and make my VOCATION, VACATION!!! 

 

Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore , June 2011