The Holiday That Required More Managing Than Going

We went away for ten days. I spent about five of them, in the non-physical sense, working.

Not my job. The holiday. The managing of the holiday: the question of where we were eating, whether the children had slept enough, whether the weather was changing and what we'd do if it did, the logistics of the day-trip we'd planned and what it required in terms of timing, food, and the right expectations.

He didn't do none of this. He did some of it, genuinely and well. But the baseline — the default running assessment of how the holiday was going and what it needed next — that still sat with me.

I've been trying to understand why this is so sticky. The division of tasks is relatively learnable. You can negotiate it, practise it, build habits around it. But the default awareness — the state of being the one who is always, in some peripheral corner of your mind, assessing — that doesn't redistribute easily. Because it's not a task. It's a posture.

The person with the posture doesn't stop having it just because someone else has taken some tasks.

I enjoyed the holiday. It was genuinely good. And I spent portions of it managing the thing I was supposed to be resting from.

I don't have a solution to this. I have the observation, which is at least a beginning.