Italian
There is a question that, with the arrival of the beautiful season, turns into a small, ruthless social ritual: “Where are you going on vacation?” If you answer that you will stay at home, you are met with compassionate and surprised looks. To avoid the embarrassment, many of us find ourselves inventing adventurous trips and extravagant destinations, just to avoid disappointing the interlocutor. This dynamic reveals a profound truth: vacation and retirement are the two most desired moments of life, but they are also the ones that expose us to the most unexpected physical and mental falls.
Holidays are short. Yet, in those two weeks, we try to pack everything we haven’t done in a year. We fill the days and nights with intensive activities – surely healthy, but far from relaxing. There is a real risk that “holidaymakers” face (a term I use in a positive sense and not derogatory, unlike those who are always on holiday because they can afford it): one gets tired of resting, and then one tries not to rest to avoid getting tired.
You leave stressed from work and return stressed from vacation. As an employee described his trip: “I drove two thousand kilometers and the car didn’t make a single noise.” There you go, his vacation was all about that, encapsulated in the functioning of an engine.
This is compounded by forced cohabitation: the family finds itself together twenty-four hours a day. A beautifully ideal concept on paper, but in reality, it forces individual members into a closeness they are no longer accustomed to.
The same dynamic occurs, on a larger scale, when the long-awaited retirement arrives.
Finally free from the tyranny of the timecard, the early morning alarm, and chronic fatigue, one enters the so-called retirement, the good retreat. But this freedom also hides a psychological trap. The long pause that precedes old age and nothingness can be extremely frightening.
Days risk becoming all the same, to be shared – even here – with loved ones every day, every month, every year, without the protective filter of the work routine.
Holidays and retirement are similar because both open the doors to a potential existential vacuum, a void that risks sucking us into a desperate rather than happy experience. Perhaps the secret lies in approaching these periods with a touch of healthy caution, even with some doubt, without loading them with grand expectations.
If we prepare for holidays and retirement without expecting absolute happiness, we will not be disappointed. Our life has value even without a departure to showcase, and our identity remains intact even when someone, one day, tells us that the time has come to go because we are no longer needed.
