Comfort and Clansmen
Here’s the thing I have never reconciled about vacations, I almost always forego comfort to be with my clansmen. Like any basic experiment, you need a control, and my control for this purpose is my home, whether a primary residence or a secondary home (I currently have both). We all work very hard to make our homes homey. We have all our stuff (per George Carlin) around us in the most convenient-sized containers. Now when you travel, you always knew you needed to carry less stuff, but you have also learned that our friends at the airport only allow you to bring three ounces or less of our stuff per container. There is a well-reasoned excuse for this that goes beyond requiring that we wear our underwear on the outside, as Woody Allen’s great dictator in Bananas declared. It has to do with the fact that when we travel, everyone thinks more people are trying to kill us.
Stop and consider that for a moment. We travel to recreate ourselves so we put ourselves in harm’s way and discomfort’s way. There are a series of ads running now that declare that man is the only animal that purposefully challenges itself more than it must for the pleasure of it. That’s an interesting thought in the context of vacation. Vacations aren’t obligatory, they aren’t even optional, they are highly prized and desired.
When we are young we travel anywhere and everywhere we can, for the sake of seeing and experiencing the world. We stay in hostels and we camp out. We trek across mountains and we sleep on the beach. And mostly we do it to get away from our families as part of the leaving the nest process. Discomfort is hardly even an inconvenience at that stage in life since sleeping on someone’s floor is almost a right of passage where the floor is more than adequate to promote happiness in a youthful sense. In a certain way, discomfort and lack of clansmen is almost an objective or else we are destined to risk failure to launch.
Then, after a few years, youth gives way to adulthood at some point. In fact, I might go so far as to argue that going on vacation is a symbol and passage of lifecycle change the way going away for a weekend with a romantic interest is a trial run for cohabitation. So, perhaps going on vacation serves both to recreate and to actually create, as in creating a pattern of awareness of and the formation of a clansmen culture. Now that I’m back to clansmen, let’s discuss that angle for a moment.
I use the word clansmen rather than family because I feel the concept I am advocating is quite primal and the word clansmen sets the stage for that feeling. We have all read of early man through and including natives and Vikings that gather with some regularity (probably as regular as their environmental constraints suggest) to be with like kind. The common anthropological wisdom is that this happens to reaffirm bonds necessary for national security and safety, but also to broaden the gene pool within as narrow a field as possible while still paying homage to biological need for diversity. These gatherings were primitive vacations and are quite instructive in explaining how we vacation today. The composition of the travel squad is quite purposeful. The old and the young tend to stay home and the focus is on the prime of lifers and the young and restless.
The other thing about clansmen is that they may or may not be blood relatives. Clansmen are like-minded individuals to whom we have connected our lives. Sometimes those are work-related friends, but most often they are people we choose to have as friends either based on where we all reside or who our children befriend. Clansmen are an important element of animal and human life. We are a pack, we are a herd, we are a gaggle, we hang together by choice and leaving the clan is a dreaded abandonment of or exile from all things necessary for civilized existence.
Back to comfort, I suppose we can suggest that comfort comes from the clan, but that is more a psychological or sociological comfort. The physical comforts of modern life focuses on four spaces; the bed, the bath, the sofa and the dining table. Everything else is either a subset of those four or is transitory at best. Take our current vacation venue, we try hard to give everyone comfortable beds of their own (alone or a deaux) and a modern (meaning functional and clean) bath. The common areas of sofa and dining table are generally acceptable in a wide variety of forms, both indoor and out (since vacations tend to involve lots of outdoor activity).
Our bath is quite roomy and functional, but as we are in “the old country” (in this case Ireland), showers are a bit more primitive. This year there is an actual separate shower, but it has a folding glass door that accommodates a width that can best described as less than my current girth. Once in the shower, there is only enough room to turn carefully. One of my size must shower with great care to avoid accidents. Comfort is forsaken. And the bed is big enough to resemble a King-sized bed, but its good that vacations involve higher than normal physical activity since fatigue overwhelms familiarity and plushness.
The sofa and dining areas are once again gathering spots and/or places of solitude until others can gather properly. These are places where good times and collective laughs, usually about the day’s activities, must mostly about some dear but misguided member of the clan and their inability to do some basic task. The clan loves to poke fun at one another as a sign of affection. The clan leader is most often a good target since it is one of the few ways that clansmen can balance the slate and still be socially within bounds.
So, my conclusion is that when it comes to vacations, we seek but do not require complete comfort. We almost always want to gather with our clansmen, for a brief but all-important encounter that reaffirms who we are and why we travel these roads.