After The Holiday, The Laundry

Frieze Art Fair, Regent’s Park (a snapshot from my mini holiday in London)

‘I’m not sure I see the point of going on holiday,’ my mum has been known to say. ‘You get home and before you know it, it feels like you never went away in the first place.’

She has a point. Like most of us, I’m not a huge fan of the first day or two back; the unpacking, all that laundry, and generally readjusting back to day-to-day life after the dreamy bubble of a holiday. But while the holiday itself might be over, its memories remain.

Stored inside us, like a hidden treasure trove, we can choose to plug back into them at any moment. Sometimes mine come to me unbidden, such as the other day, walking through a London park, where the particular way sunlight fell through a cluster of trees transported me back to a walking holiday in the Alps, many years ago. For a few moments, I was right back in that mountain landscape, with its crisp air and earthy scent of pines. And earlier this week, sipping some chai tea I'd made, I was taken back to the balmy heat of late afternoon in Goa, January 2007, sitting on a wooden bench at the hotel my friends and I were staying at, and drinking chai and eating cake. When these memories bubble up, they bring me joy.

Of course, we can also remember things in a mournful If only I were still drinking sunset cocktails by the beach rather than stuck at my desk in the autumn rain way. Which we've all probably done. But instead of using memories to remind ourselves of what we no longer have, we can consciously use them as a doorway back into the felt sense of delight or wonder that a particular experience gave us.

They don’t, of course, need to come from a holiday in the conventional sense of the word, where we pack our suitcase and go away for a number of days or weeks. It’s worth remembering that the word holiday originates from holy day. Prior to the fifteenth century, it referred to days taken off work to celebrate a religious festival. I like to think of a holiday as anything where we step away from our day-to-day routines and responsibilities - perhaps just for a few hours or even minutes - and into what we consider the sacred. Not in the religious sense, but in the what feels uplifting and meaningful to us sense. Whether it’s seeing art or going to the movies or out dancing. Or perhaps it’s spending time with a much-loved friend, or just sitting alone on a park bench for a few minutes and watching the sky. Or one of my own (almost daily) favourites: an afternoon cup of tea & some chocolate, with no distractions, so I can fully savour them.

Whenever we make space for these experiences, we’re also adding to our bank of memories, which we can then tap into at other times:

Take a moment to close your eyes and bring to mind the memory of a delightful experience. As you hold it in your awareness, recreate the particular scene as vividly as you can, engaging as many of your senses as possible, including sounds, smells and even the sensations you experienced in your body. Notice how you feel. Then let go of the memory itself, and just stay with its felt sense, breathing into it. You might choose to practice this more formally, setting aside a few minutes to sit with a tall spine in a meditation posture (on the floor or in a chair), or to lie down. But it’s also something we can slide into for a few moments while in the midst of something else, such as sitting at our desk in the autumn rain, or cooking dinner.

We tend to think a wonderful experience is what makes us feel good. But what if we turn this thought on its head and consider that, perhaps, the feeling of wellbeing brought about by doing something lovely is actually a feeling that lives innately within us. And the experience itself is an entry point to the delight and wonder that live in somewhere inside each one of us.