Last week, I spent a few days on vacation in Nashville (home to country music and Nashville hot chicken). As expected, it was absolutely wonderful!
I was in charge of planning activities, which meant I could sneak in some museum visits and sightseeing amongst the bar-hopping and live country music that Nashville is renowned for (though we did plenty of that too!). My boyfriend was in charge of food, compiling plentiful recommendations to make sure we got to try the best of the local cuisine. It was a gorgeous trip, full of long sunny walks, happy hours listening to country tunes, beautiful sights and exhibits, and, of course, lots of hot chicken and biscuits (side note for British readers: these are not the biscuits you have in mind!).
Surprisingly enough, it was also a trip full of rest and stillness. When it comes to visiting new places, I often default to being the go-go-go kind of traveler, meticulously planning out a schedule that has me running from one sight to another all day. There’s always so much I want to do and so little time to do it all!
This kind of travel can be immensely fulfilling, but it’s also quite tiring. The rush of exhilaration you get at the end of the day feels more like the satisfaction of checking everything off a to-do list, rather than the joy of getting to explore at your own pace, in your own time. The anxiety of making sure you can fit everything into the precious few hours that you have can trump the relaxation that’s supposed to come with being on vacation.
This time I just didn’t have the energy for that kind of organization. On our first morning in Nashville, I woke up with no agenda in mind, just a vague sense of the main activities I wanted to do each day. Instead of figuring out how to maximize every waking moment, I sat back and allowed myself to have a few quiet mornings instead, followed by post-lunch explorations.
I did easy workouts in the hotel gym. I took long walks in the park, taking a few laps around the pond each time. I took my time having breakfast. And I read and read and read, allowing myself to escape into fictional worlds while sitting outside enjoying the sun (another side note if anyone wants a reading rec: one of the books I read, Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, was hands-down my favorite fiction read of the year. Highly recommend. I still can’t stop thinking about it!).
As with everything in life, this choice also required some sacrifices. We didn’t manage to make it to one of the museums I wanted to visit on time, which ultimately meant that it was dropped from the agenda altogether. A few bars were too full on the day we wanted to go there. A couple of sights were left unvisited.
This all seems so trivial when I write it down! But I have to admit that I felt some small sense of existential dread in missing out on anything at all. I wanted to beat myself up a little for failing to fully seize the day. I know I’m unlikely to return to Nashville in the near future, so I probably won’t get to see those sights that I missed anytime soon, if ever (?!).
You can paint this anxiety in a positive light, calling it curiosity or openness or a desire to explore. But at the end of the day, I think it’s more about fear. It’s the fear of not doing it all, not seeing it all, not having it all. And, on top of that there’s the discomfort you feel from going against the grain in not even trying to do it all in the first place.
This is one of the biggest lessons I’m figuring out in my twenties: you can’t have it all. This goes for any area of life, no matter how small or large. Given a limited amount of time and a plethora of opportunities, having it all is literally impossible. Oliver Burkeman discusses this in great depth and detail in his book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. Emma Gannon reminds us of this again in her new book The Success Myth (another side note: I know a few people are here from Emma’s wonderful newsletter The Hyphen - has anyone else read The Success Myth yet? What did you think?). Trying to have it all just leads to burnout and exhaustion. It’s much better to figure out what it is you really want and go for it, being clear on what sacrifices you might need to make to live in the way you want.
This is a bit of a grand point to make about a little trip, perhaps, but a little part of me was genuinely surprised by how much better I felt when I wasn’t, uh, actively trying to maximize my happiness at each moment. I thought I’d be more annoyed about missing out on things, but I found that I cherished the slow mornings, the ease of making just a few plans for the day, and the flexibility it gave us to move through the day as we wished. Sometimes this meant staying in to watch a movie instead of going on a bar crawl because we were tired. Sometimes it meant an impromptu decision to push back lunch so we could tour a beautiful old mansion and a replica of the Parthenon, because we felt energized and just HAD to see it all!
Each person has their own vacation preferences of course, and this might differ depending on where you go and how you’re feeling at any point in time too. But at this moment in time, this combination of leisurely mornings and a few things to explore each day was exactly what I needed. I returned from vacation feeling well-rested, but also buzzing from all the experiences we had and things we saw.
I know rationally that we can’t have it all. I’ve been working on coming to terms with this on a more intuitive level, being honest about what really matters to me in life and not feeling guilty about giving up the things that matter less. I always thought this process was going to be scary, both because it involves confronting our limitations and because it goes against what society tells us we should do. But what I’m starting to see, slowly, in little moments like this, is that not trying it to have it all isn’t always so terrifying. Sometimes it feels comfortable, like taking a big exhale. Especially when slow mornings of walking and reading are involved.
I relate so much with everything you write. Love it.
Not trying to maximise your happiness at all times really resonated with me - just enjoying and being can be the best thing to do. To let go a little!
Also read The Success Myth and I found so much I resonated with there - I thoroughly enjoyed it and every myth covered!