A totally purposeless vacation

And what it might mean to float free

I’m lying on a hotel room bed, writing this in my notebook, with pen and ink. I’m on the road for a few days and in the past that would have come with the urge to share every experience, but, this time, I’m trying to touch my phone as little as possible. I’m trying to resist the urge to post every new view. Every cityscape. Every interesting hotel lobby. Every mind-blowing cocktail and meal. In the past, I felt a compulsion that everyone should see the time I was having. Like so many of us, I wanted witnesses to my adventures.

Now, not so much. This trip, I’m going in a whole other direction. Instead of extending into the online, I’m sinking into myself. I’m hanging out in my body. I am being. I am sitting and walking and mostly going with the flow. Just now, I road the elevator down from the hotel breakfast. The hotel is old and the elevator is slow. Four floors took a while and as I waited, I smelled the lingering coffee from someone’s drink. I listened to the sound as the floors clicked past. I studied the historical photo on the back of the elevator door. I felt my feet, rooted to the ground, even as I was stories above it.

I am trying, in other words, to experience instead of to perform. I am watching with no eye but to my own pleasure and interest. I am trying to shake loose of something that has become second nature.

Photo by Holden Baxter on Unsplash

All of this is made easier by the fact that I am along for the ride on this trip. It’s my husband’s conference. His itinerary. I could have registered. There were lots of interesting sessions I could have attended. I’m glad I didn’t. I have zero obligation. I can fill my days as I please in a place I lived in briefly years ago. A place that is both new and not new.

It’s the perfect trip by my reckoning. I am on my own, but not alone. I have no agenda. If I want to stay in my hotel room until noon, I can. Maybe I’ll write. Maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll go explore old haunts from when I lived here before. Maybe not. I have no plan. I have nothing that has to be done. I haven’t felt this free in a long time.

I don’t want to look at anything online more involved than restaurant recommendations. I want to take a vacation from spending too much time there…from letting social media and e-mail and all those compulsions fill up the space inside my head. I don’t know what else to say except that I want a few days to just BE. Freed from the dishes that need to be washed and the weeds that need to be pulled.

What is it just to be? What is it to experience a totally purposeless vacation? Not a vacation to lie on the beach. Not to explore a new place. Not to go to workshops or sessions. Not to visit relatives. Not even to have the vague sense that the price of the ticket must be earned. The hotel room was going to be rented anyway. The drive was going to be made. The meals paid for. I am extraneous. Unnecessary.

On the drive down, we passed the exit for Smiths Grove, a town in Kentucky I have never been to. It’s in the foothills of the mountains, somewhere between Louisville and Bowling Green. When I used to make this drive all the time in my twenties, I had a fantasy of taking that exit. I’d drive down the road to Smiths Grove. I’d rent a house or an apartment above a store in a quaint downtown. I didn’t know then and I still don’t know now whether or not Smiths Grove has a quaint downtown or not. All I knew was that I would take that exit and stay in Smiths Grove and never tell a soul. I would disappear from the places and the people in my life. I would live with no attachments.

Perhaps this was my own version of Thoreau’s escape into the “wilderness,” only even in that fantasy, the wilderness held no interest for me. Or the wilderness is a place where no one knows me. Probably other people’s fantasies involve disappearing into Paris or India, but my imagination could only stretch as far as Smiths Grove, Kentucky.

What would it be like to be in a space that has no pull on me? That was the question that made me watch for that exit sign on every trip. What happens when the gravity of place disappears? What is it to perhaps float free?