No, this is not about physics — or about the television serial that carries a part of this title. This is about how you and I feel on many, many days of our lives, most notably when we have just returned to the routine after a wonderful break.
Our minds and hearts are still in that faraway place — trekking through the hills or along the streets of an ancient town that has not changed much in a couple of millennia. We are still on a relaxing cruise in calm waters or sitting under an umbrella on the beach or best of all, walking into the dining room for a meal whose ingredients we have not had to think about, not had to trudge through a market to obtain, and not had to perspire over a stove to prepare. What’s more, we have the additional comfort of knowing that when we have eaten to our heart’s content, we do not have to one day ‘return’ the hospitality that we have enjoyed! It was all pre-paid on our own debit cards!
For more and more of us now, flying off for a break does not really involve divorcing ourselves completely from the routine business of earning a living. We find it almost impossible to ‘disconnect’ and we flip open those laptops either to appease our consciences or for real work requirements that cannot be shelved until our return.
Except for those brief forays into our work life, however, the rest of our everyday routines are not only shelved, they are completely forgotten. And thus, on our return, when we are confronted with a freezer that is over-frozen or a leak that has soiled the bedroom carpet, we come down from our euphoric state with a mighty bang.
Back with a vengeance
We had given ourselves a day or two to unpack and rewind mentally, download all those hundreds of photographs, flip through them and choose which ones to keep and which ones to delete; but here we are, scrubbing down the carpet and the floor, using every tool we can find to get into that freezer without splitting it in two to get out our meal ...
The holiday is over.
Real life has come back with a vengeance. Despite better sense, regrets and questions pop up: Maybe if we hadn’t gone off on that trip in the first place we wouldn’t have the over-frozen freezer and the sodden carpet ... Should we have stayed put and kept the house running as it always did? Do all those luxuriously languid moments under the beach umbrella compensate for this?
For some of us, returning from a break is not the only big bang that occurs in our lives. We have the same feeling when our loved ones visit us — and then leave.
Long before they show up, long before they even get their tickets, we work ourselves into a minor frenzy of planning their outings and organising our schedules so that we can accompany them wherever they want to go — or wherever we would like to take them to ensure they have a wonderful time. We pre-prepare meals, we empty out closets for them, we rummage through our treasures to see which ones they would like, we do as much of our work as we possibly can in advance so that office requirements won’t take up the time that we would rather spend with them. And suddenly they are there; there is a whirlwind of happy activity; and just as suddenly they are gone.
And once again we crash-land into the humdrum, the mundane: This business of everyday life.
Any wonder, then, that some of us are constantly planning our next move — or that of a loved one who can get us back to our happy high?
Cheryl Rao is a journalist based in India.
