Life as a Sum

of Working Vacation

and Recovering Retirement

Posted on Cinco de Mayo, 2025

 

Why divide up work, healing, vacations, and retirement? Why not mix them into a joyful, fulfilling blend of career(s), fun, growth, and relaxation?

How? One way is to join similarities between these four “parts” of life. This means looking beyond activities to how our minds work.

All four areas of life - activity, recreation, rest and recovery - have many things in common: pain and pleasure, growth, stagnation, regression, learning, letting go, consolidation, breaks, activities, transcendence, and interconnections. The last two pieces of common ground, transcendence and interconnections, give us a solid continent on which to build integrated lives.

Another way of saying interconnections and transcendence are synthesis and rising above. These are also essential aspects of spirituality. Here’s how a spiritual approach to life can help us rise above alienation and disintegration to add everything in our lives outward, rather than just inward into some disintegrated “things”:

 

1. Awareness is the first step toward spirituality and transcendence. Have you ever noticed more at certain times than at others? Staying aware can show us how conscious moments, those in which we notice new phenomena imprinting lasting memories, are different from the blur of assembling widgets in factories. The saying, “Stay alert, stay alive” is true in every sense of the words “alert” and “alive.” So gaining better control over when to narrowly focus attention like an experimental scientist versus when to broaden out of tunnel vision toward a sort of Zen big-picture looking can pay big dividends in seeing things no one else sees. Broadening and narrowing awareness intentionally while assembling widgets, for example, could help you discover a better way to make those widgets, eventually earning you a fortune or at least a promotion.
2.  Nothing other than mindful awareness is more important to living spiritually healthy lives than intent. To get the most out of every area of life, we must regulate and combine our bodies and minds  - setting our intent and the actions flowing from our intent carefully. More aware intent leads to more meaningful work, recreation, healing and rest. Yes, even rest can be more intentional. For example, we can go to sleep repeating some words we’ve decided to automatize in our sleep. To decide which words to use, we ask ourselves which words are most relevant to our living a loving, independent, responsible, healthy life.
3. Two areas we want to keep returning our awareness and intent to are similarities and differences in phenomena. It has even been said that comparing and contrasting are the basic methods of our minds. True, a dividing and subtracting versus a multiplying and adding view of the mind is too reliant on a partial model of consciousness (computers and AI), but breaking down and adding up phenomena into meaningful explanations of parts of the world and their relationships is still most of what our minds do when trying to understand the fire hose of perceptions blasting at us every waking moment from every direction through all our senses. It's just as important, though, to look beyond breaking into parts and adding up pieces. Looking beyond, beyond, and farther beyond, is how we most grow.
4. This brings us to the big payoff: transcendence. The spiritual, transcendent, miraculous real nature of Nature - which includes everything discussed above and so much more - is beyond, beyond, and farther beyond our little package-deals of meaning known as words, languages and symbols. So, any method we can use to let go of force-fitting existence into word-boxes is a fair strategy for being more spiritual, so long as our methods are not harmful or unhealthy. Turning our attention and intention away from words and symbols, and instead opening ourselves as dynamic human becomings toward non-linguistic (non-symbolic) experiences, can help us see that in the really big picture, “retirement,” “vacations,” “healing” and “work” are just so many empty words - just so many marks on paper, or electrons flying away from computer monitors, or sounds floating through the air, or body movements. These linguistic signals, which we sometimes need to use but just as often use us, need not be separate from each other. Everything is interconnected. There just aren't any coincidences. If we look and think hard enough, we can always find connections - we could find connections between the way we look in the mirror and the price of tamales in Mexico City if we just looked hard enough. So, if we look for similarities and connections long enough, eventually we'll find them. For example, we could make a “work” career out of a “retirement” hobby, or a working vacation in Europe into a permanent digital nomadic adventure, or an extended stay in a hospital into an opportunity to finish an online course while learning more about our health or reminiscing over old family photos to consolidate memories.

In short, Life as an integration of working vacation and recovering retirement is not about blurring lines - it’s about seeing through and then walking through borders and orders that have always been artificial - a word meaning “constructed by people.”