Long Weekend

People had 4 days ... 4 days to forget about work for the meantime and just do something else.  And what is that something else?  

1.  Some people went to the beach. You know how it is, get a tan, get drunk, get laid - that kind of stuff - the stuff that holy week is made off.  

2.  Some people went on a vacation - the kind that requires flying out of the country, because you can really get away from it all in 4 days.  

3.  Some people got bored.  Accustomed to a life of routine where they work for about 9 hours, a 4-day stretch with no work was just too much of a weird interruption to their daily routine that their brains searched for their usual work fix, pretty much like withdrawal symptoms.

Just now I can sense that I'm using this condescending tone as I describe what people found themselves doing during the long weekend.  Yeah, there's some of that, and maybe a little bit of envy because I was not in the beach, and I didn't fly out, and I didn't suffer from work withdrawal symptoms.  Actually I'm wondering what happened to the long weekend - did it just evaporate, or did I really sleep it all away?

Throughout the country, or at least in the circle that I know, there was a tangible need to create a frenzy of activities during this 4-day weekend.  It's like we had to do something, ANYTHING really, just to avoid the silence and solitude that would have been the default consequence of closed stores, vacationing friends, and closed offices.  Being silent is way too scary, who knows what crazy ideas we'll run into if we actually spent some quiet times just observing our thoughts and being aware of our feelings.

It's Sunday morning as I write this, and the people who went out of town will now all try to go back to the city to prepare for Monday.  The trip itself will be one more thing that will take our minds off our inner thoughts.  Traffic grinding to a halt in expressways, the crowded gas stations that people stop at, the music they play in the car - yup, they'll get all the distraction they need.  We're not really prepared to confront what's going on in our inner world, so we just create distractions.

And just to make it clear, I am no exception.  I might have stayed at home but I created distractions too - DVDs, books, buko juice diet, trips to the gym, chocolates, this new blog.  And just like that, the weekend vanished.  I might say that I wish we could have more than 4 days, but really, that will only create another need to fill up the quiet moments with anything just to avoid the silence.