MAGAZINE
The summer when anything seems possible: why holidays make us want to change our lives
On the third day, it is always the same line. A drink in hand, the light growing soft, someone says, “You know, we could live here.” No one really laughs — everyone knows they had thought it before hearing it. Why do twelve days convince us that we should change everything?
Because the setting was doing our thinking for us
Ordinary life is made up of more than decisions: it is made up of ruts. The route we no longer work out, the time we get up and no longer question, the role we slip back into on Monday like putting on a jacket. They save energy — and silently decide for us a hundred times a day.
Leaving means unplugging them all at once: the brain has to take charge again of tiny things — which way to go, when to eat, whom to talk to. It is tiring for two days, then becomes a forgotten feeling we call, for lack of a better word, freedom. It is not the place we like so much; it is becoming the one who chooses again.
Because it is not a dream, it is an experience
Dreaming of living differently changes no one: we have been dreaming about it on our sofas for years. On holiday, we do not dream — we test it. We sleep better, walk for two hours without thinking about it, and talk to strangers without effort.
The body has just produced evidence, and evidence we have lived carries more weight than a hypothesis. “I know I can live differently; I just did it for twelve days” is not a story we tell ourselves: it is a result. The problem lies elsewhere — in what we think we measured.
The trap: we confuse the desire with the setting
Those twelve days are not a life; they are a very particular slice of one: no rent to pay there, no February, no bureaucracy. The harbor tavern is lovely in August; we have not seen January, when it closes, or the fifteen-hour days of the person who runs it. Hence the phrase to handle gently: “I want to open a bar on an island” often means “I want to breathe”. The desire is real; the translation is wrong — and many holiday letdowns begin there.
The right question fits on one line
Instead of “Could I live here?”, there is a more honest question: what exactly will I miss next Tuesday, at three in the afternoon? The answer is almost always a variable, never a country. The light. Not being reachable. Walking instead of driving. Or simply not having to pretend to be someone else for twelve days.
A variable can be brought home. You do not move to Naxos for the light: you move your desk beside the window, walk home two evenings a week, turn off notifications at seven. Very small gestures that touch precisely what the holiday touched. The big gesture is sometimes the right one, but it deserves to wait until the desire has survived six weeks of rain: what remains true at All Saints’ Day is true.
Keep the thread, not just the memory
The urge to change your life fades less through giving up than through disconnection: in the first week we think about it every day, by the third not at all, and by November we no longer remember what we understood. Write three sentences when you get back, do not reread them until All Saints’ Day, and let in a little of the world you left behind — the local radio station from the country you visited, heard in your kitchen on a Tuesday morning, brings back in thirty seconds a light no photo can capture.
Perhaps that is the real lesson of those summers when anything seems possible: they do not ask us to leave everything behind. They show us what we need, and give us the year to bring some of it home, without a plane ticket.
— The Terondo editorial team. The whole world fits in a radio, a webcam, and a little curiosity.
Photo: Dietmar Rabich — CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.