The key to a good vacation (and life): Learn to roll with it

[This was written last night at about 2:00 AM]

I’m writing to you from beautiful Terminal 5 in the JFK airport at 1:46 in the morning.  It’s just me, Will, and another traveler who is going to Austin in the morning.  Naturally the lights are on bright and two different radios are playing, so sleep is hard to come by.  But even with all that, and my natural tendency to get really cranky when I don’t get a full 8 hours of sleep, I am extremely happy.  I feel relief, joy, and an inner relaxation like I haven’t quite experienced before.  In short, I’m rolling with it, and it’s great.

I, like many of you, am not a “roll with it” kind of person by nature.  I am hyper-organized and trips and events are planned out well ahead of time and to an unnecessary degree of specificity.  It’s my way of trying to keep anything bad from happening to me.  And sometimes it is very necessary.  For instance, I am going to Bogota in two weeks and I needed a place to stay.  So I did some research and found out that while Bogota is generally very safe, the area where many hostels are located has become a dangerous place for muggings late at night.  After some more research and help from Twitter I found a place close to the Presidential Palace where there is more security.  If I hadn’t done checking ahead of time things could have not turned out well.

On the other hand, there is usually no need to excessively plan out every detail.  And experimenting with spontaneity will give you the knowledge that things won’t fall apart just because you didn’t have time to plan everything out.  Because here’s the thing: You can’t plan for everything, and stuff happens.  A hurricane could hit on your vacation, your computer could get a nasty virus right before you leave on your big blogging trip, or your hotel could have sudden construction when you show up. There is no level of planning that can eliminate every risk, and so at some point you just have to jump in.  It’s like starting a business, there are so many variables that you can’t even think of most of them.  If you wait until you have it all figured out, you’ll be dead and no one wants to buy from a business owned by a dead guy.

Since you can’t plan out everything in advance (and don’t want to anyway) you need to be able to roll with it.  Acknowledge the situation as it is, evaluate it, and decide whether it is better to try to change it or adapt yourself to it.  Sometimes your Type A urge to FIX EVERYTHING is useful and will make things a lot better (like asking for a different room when the one you’re given smells like a smoker died in there and exploded in a cloud of ash), but sometimes you will waste much more time and energy trying to fix it than if you just accepted your current lot and made the best of it.  So that’s where I am now, making the best of it.  It’s amazing, once you let go of the perfect ideal of your trip, you can just have fun and enjoy what you’re actually getting.