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‘Tis the Season to Wrap It Up
During Thanksgiving weekend, I pulled the trigger on plane tickets for my very first real vacation since February 2020. If all goes according to plan, I will spend the second half of January blissfully off deadline, off email, and, quite probably, out of reach by cellular signals altogether.
It isn’t easy to unplug these days, and harder still when you’re a self-employed creative whose living relies on providing assorted ‘deliverables’ to a rotating cast of characters with varied institutional affiliations. As soon as those tickets were bought, I knew that —variants notwithstanding— any hope of a January vacation rested on getting things done now. And to hold myself to it, I’d have to abide by a strict but simple rule. To quote writer Rosie Spinks in Forge: No New Plans.
“The idea that humans should spend the holiday season — which coincides with winter in the northern hemisphere — rushing around, drinking copious amounts of alcohol, wearing sequins, and being hyper-social has always been discordant anyway,” Spinks writes.
