Total physical and mental inertia are highly agreeable, much more so than we allow ourselves to imagine. A beach not only permits such inertia but enforces it, thus neatly eliminating all problems of guilt. It is now the only place in our overly active world that does.
—John Kenneth Galbraith

St Lucia

There are trips and then there are vacations. On a trip you explore the new and the different; you welcome novelty, seek out the unusual, and turn left or right when your original intention had been to go straight. On a trip you look, wide-eyed (by which I mean more a mental state than a physical one) inwardly adjusting the aperture of your gaze to let in the maximum number of visual impressions. These are, in turn, the grist for some mulling mill, the end product of which is another chapter completed in the narrative that represents your life's remarkable (i.e., remark-able) events.

A vacation, on the other hand, has (or should have) a mindlessness that exists in a tranquil, ideally guiltless, contrast to the mindfulness of a trip. The proper vacation should represent the cessation of narration, a blissful thumbing-of-the-nose at time, schedules, events, and "experiences." The perfect (winter) vacation should consist of nothing more than entire days spent lazing on a warm, shady beach where the chief activities of reading well and watching the waves come in are punctuated only by the occasional meal, runs for drinks, and soothing dips in warm, enveloping waters.

The beach is like a metaphoric knitting needle through the frontal lobe; a virtual lobotomy that knocks out the higher reasoning centres as well as the lower-level action/stimulus nexus. The beach mechanisms—from the gentle, whispering breezes to the soft, walk-slowing sand, to the incessant waves that produce with each crash an equivalent series of alpha waves in the mind—create a kind of "call to inaction," an inner stillness that's the flip side, the lazy twin, of Zen enlightenment. It's a melancholic state that you could easily mistake for depression if it wasn't for the underlying feeling of well-being. It's a quicksandish lethargy where even the thought of energetic activity is not only laughable but also painful (a sort of mental pulled muscle).

So I say "No thanks" to the frantic comings-and-goings of the sporting/touring crowd with their one-more-mountain-to-climb-one-more-river-to-cross-check-that-pony-off-the-to-do-list-what's-next? attitude. I'm perfectly happy in my recumbent, beached-whale, quietude. Now if I could only figure out how to extend this week of bliss for the entire five months of winter, I'd have it made in the shade...

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