Vacation is Hard

...not necessarily because going on vacation is hard, but coming back from it? Oof.

I just spent 10 days camping without cell phone service at a spiritual retreat. Had a great time, hung out with friends that I only see once a year, and had some seriously knock-your-socks-off spiritual moments.

Then, the return to day-to-day "normalcy". Usually it takes me a few hours, maybe a day at most to get back into the swing of things. For whatever reason this time? It's already a week and I'm still not back. And, when I say "I'm not back" what I mean is that my brain isn't working in normal mode yet. Here, let me give you an example.

When camping for 10 days with 200+ of your closest friends it's "normal" to have a 10'x10' popup structure for your kitchen, a 10'x20' carport for your living room, and have an 8 person tent for 2 people. This, of course, presents challenges. Things such as "how do I keep water from dripping down between the kitchen and the living room".

The context switch between solving such physical, tangible, see-results-immediately problems and solving "how do I connect to this database through a ssh tunnel again?" is so massive I don't have words to describe it and I haven't been this tired in a long time. I've tried "easing" back into it and that failed pretty miserably when I couldn't remember half my passwords which immediately threw me into option 2 "jumping into the deep end" which also failed miserably.

What I can't get out of my head is what an amazing time I had camping and how much I wish I was right back up there. It's a calling on a deeply personal, spiritual level. Maybe the only answer is to try to rebuild that same experience here back in the "real world".

Wish me luck...