In past years, I’ve written here about what Pride means to me as a gay man, as a CEO, as a person who loves spending time in nature, and the intersection of all of those things.
It isn’t about me though: the ongoing movement for full LGBTQ+ equality, the effort to reclaim nature for all of us, and the counterculture of carving out more free time are not individual pursuits to achieve individual ends, but collective efforts — large and small, loud and quiet, public and private — to create a better and more just world.
And so, this month we’re celebrating Pride by spotlighting our LGBTQ+ guests, creators, and community. Additionally we’ll be donating to the two organizations highlighted below. We hope you will join us in championing their efforts.
This June, we’re celebrating the joyous, inclusive communities that bring light to the natural world around us. We’ve partnered with @queerart and @southernequalitystudios—two organizations that support LGBTQIA+ equality, throughout the arts and beyond.
I know it’s common to tell ourselves “when X happens, then everything will be better.” For me it’s always been “when things slow down a bit, it will be better.” If things slowed down a bit, I’d finally have some quiet time for myself, my partner, and my home. I’d get to do what I’ve been putting off.I’d recharge. I’d finally focus on my physical and mental wellbeing.
Right now, on paper, it would appear that most of us have more time—no commute, nothing to do out of the house after work, no travel. But despite the change in pace, here we are feeling almost as jam-packed as ever. Prior to COVID, never had my life slowed down so much, and yet, projects remain unfinished, books unread, hobbies unstarted, and friends neglected.
Why?
It of course starts with the inundation of social obligations over Zoom, adjusting to major life changes, and feeling the pressure of trying to find a new job or adjusting to working productively from home.
But I think there is another, perhaps, even bigger reason: it’s that more time alone won’t produce the life we want. When things slow down a bit, it won’t automatically make things better. It sounds trite, but this is about choices. We have to choose what we want to do, and we have to choose what we don’t want to do. It’s that simple. That notion is the key to making things happen. It’s on us as individuals to choose how we spend our time—now, and when things return to normal.
We shouldn’t be hard on ourselves about not having it all figured out—this is a really hard time to do self-work. But, we should also let it be a lesson that we can’t wait for things to improve all on their own. We can still use this time to inform those choices. What is different in your life now that is working for you? Let’s try to keep those things. Have you found the joy of an all-day picnic? Don’t give it up just because the world gets “back to normal!” Getting an extra hour of sleep because you can skip your commute? Maybe skip the extra coffee time in favor a few more winks permanently. That weekday lunch with your partner that wasn’t possible before — can you hang onto it somehow, at least sometimes? These changes probably happened by the default of our current situation, but if they feel right that says so much about the choices you should make going forward.
We have to make the future we want. Now more than ever, I’m making the decision to choose how I show up after this is all over. My challenge to you is to really consider and record how you want to emerge when life resumes. Slowing down on its own is not the key to making things better—we are. Regardless of the pace of life, we have to be choiceful about how we spend our time, and that will never change.
In his book Leisure: The Basis of Culture Josef Pieper wrote, “The inmost significance of the exaggerated value which is set upon hard work appears to be this: man seems to mistrust everything that is effortless; he can only enjoy, with a good conscience, what he has acquired with toil and trouble; he refuses to have anything as a gift.”
This sentiment, I hope, is changing. But most of us know someone like Professor Pieper was writing about: the co-worker who makes a show of coming to work early or staying late; the friend who can’t stop talking about how much they work; or worse, the friend who truly does seem to work themself to the bone — for no apparent reason. More personally, I can admit to some feelings of pride simply from putting in long hours rather than getting anything done or making any difference.
I was raised on the idea of hard work being best, and it’s hard to shake the lesson. I still believe in work — broadly defined to include all work, not just traditional, paid work — but would suggest we change the frame from ‘hard work’ to ‘honest work.’ Honest work is about being honest with yourself and those around you. What do you really need to do, and what is filling time? How much of your time does a given project deserve? When does it have to be perfect, and when is perfect the enemy of the good? Is work intruding on the rest of life — leisure time, as Pieper might call it, or “off time” as I prefer (leisure reminds me of pink flamingos and shuffleboard — although that doesn’t sound so bad now that I think about it).
Pieper’s idea has been top of mind as we have prepared for the launch of two new Outposts tomorrow – Getaway Piney Woods, outside of Dallas, and Getaway Catskills East, north of New York City. I’m proud of the team for making this happen — our fifth and sixth launches of the year! — but it also means it has been a period of intense work for our team.
Aiming to be ambitious and realistic but not hypocritical, I guide the team to recognize that there will be periods of intense effort but that those times must be punctuated by meaningful rest. So as we welcome Getaway Piney Woods and Getaway Catskills East into the world tomorrow, I am looking forward to the team getting so more off time than they’ve had lately.
Off time is really important. Off time, as Pieper says, is a gift, and one we shouldn’t refuse. And contrary to the way many of us were raised: off time isn’t unproductive. Letting your mind and body rest recharges you. Off time is often when new ideas pop into our brain. It is when we deepen our bonds with our friends, family, and communities. Off time allows us to take the long view — have you ever found that, without planning to do so, you end up making big life decisions when you finally go on that vacation?
A Getaway guest emphasized to me the importance of off time this week. I email with a lot of guests, and one wrote back to me after we had traded notes a few weeks ago about her Getaway. Her follow up email had an attachment: an ultrasound. She wrote:
Hi Jon, I wanted to reach out to you because something truly amazing happened at our Getaway. After trying to conceive for a year we’ve learned that we are expecting! I truly believe that being in such a wholesome and relaxing environment really played a huge part and I wanted to thank you guys for being around. Attached is a picture! Thanks again, T
We never could have anticipated the state of the world when we picked a publication date for Getting Away, our latest book. The timing couldn’t have been worse in a lot of ways, but I also think the message of this book is more relevant now than ever.
I initially wrote Getting Away: 75 Everyday Practices for Finding Balance in our Always-On World to capture a series of simple practices that allow you to get away without going to the woods. Though much of Getaway is about spending time alone in nature, the spirit, at a higher level, is about making meaningful choices. It’s about how we spend our time, and therefore, our lives, that allows us to better know ourselves through disconnection and introspection. Making these choices isn’t easy, and that’s why we have to be deliberate about it.
At its core, Getaway does something wonderful. It forces these choices with a pause, creating an environment where you can just be. It helps you change your context, thrusting you into quiet and ferrying you away from all the noise of day to day life. In the quiet, you pay attention, take stock of the habits that add value and joy to your life, and confront the habits that don’t.
There is no perfect recipe for finding balance between work and leisure, connection and disconnection, city and nature. And if there were, a recipe that would work for me would almost certainly not work for everyone. This book is an offering of little sparks that just might start a fire. I hope you will explore them, pick and choose what might work for you, and dare to try a couple of practices that you might initially look past. They run the gamut: some are as uncomplicated as turning off notifications or subscribing to the print edition, and others require a bit more effort, like writing postcards to friends. I’ve spent my life trying varying combinations of these 75. I don’t exercise them every day, and I’ve never been able to master them all. I don’t expect that from myself or anyone else, but if just one practice improves one person’s life in a small, but meaningful, way, then I’m happy.
Getting Away isn’t about taking a trip, throwing away your cell phone, canceling your wifi, or changing your life from top to bottom. It isn’t a magic formula, a how-to, or ten-step process. Rather, it’s a collection of ideas that have worked in my pursuit of more balance; a study of the small things to do that make differences that matter. Those things and what matters in your own life are up to you. This book, I hope, is just a jumping off point for your own discovery.
Did you know that April is “Stress Awareness Month”? If your response is, “Thanks, but I’m well aware of my stress every month of the year,” well… I hear you.
In many ways, the past year has felt like the ultimate stress test, as the pandemic threw us all into simultaneous public health, economic, and social crises. Now, thanks to a surprisingly speedy vaccine rollout, Americans are beginning to envision a post-pandemic world, as schools, shops, restaurants, and workplaces open up again. But this brings its own set of stressors: Will we be awkward in social settings after so much time apart? What might our workplaces and schools ask of us now? Can we make up for lost time? Will we have to?
I don’t think anyone would disagree that this Year of Covid has been uniquely stressful. But Stress Awareness Month isn’t just about recognizing that stress exists in our lives. It’s about differentiating between the kind of stress that can light a fire under us, and the kind that feels like it’s grinding us down.
Researchers differentiate between three types of stress: acute stress, episodic acute stress, and chronic stress. Acute, or short-term stress—the kind our early ancestors faced when a hungry predator approached—triggers the brain to release the hormones that prepare the body for the “fight or flight” response: epinephrine (adrenaline) increases heart rate and blood pressure, providing your body with a jolt of energy, while cortisol increases glucose levels in the brain and bloodstream, fueling your muscles and enabling you to stay focused under pressure.
Today, we’re less likely to face stress in the form of hungry wild animals (I hope!) and more likely to encounter it as we race to meet a deadline, give an important presentation, or strive to make a good impression on a first date. In limited doses, stress isn’t necessarily a bad thing—it can inspire us to do our best work, while building our resilience.
But living in a frequent (episodic) or constant (chronic) state of stress does the opposite. Being stressed all the time will worsen your mood, making you prone to irritability, negativity, and depression. Even more alarming, over time chronic stress can lead to serious physical problems including migraine, digestive disorders, and increased risk of cardiovascular disease.
I can always tell I’m spiraling into stress when I feel like I have too many thoughts rolling around in my head. That happened to me earlier this month, as I began prepping my notes for an upcoming Getaway board meeting. In these moments, I can get caught up in self-doubt and anxiety, worried about whether I’m meeting expectations and if my ideas make sense.
In order to break the cycle of circular thinking, I find it helpful to go for a walk, take a bath, or listen to a podcast. A change of scenery or the sound of other voices can get me out of my head long enough to give me some much-needed perspective.
I also find it helpful to focus on the other side of the thing that’s causing me stress. Sometimes I remind myself of mantras like The only way out is through or This too shall pass. They may be a little corny, but they hold truth. I remind myself that the board meeting is just a moment in time. The next day, it’ll be behind me.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve found it helpful to think back on past experience as a guidepost. I remind myself that I always go through this period of stress and anxiety before board meetings. But then I always pull my notes together, and even enjoy myself, as the team and I work to move the company forward.
No matter how stressful things are right now, there’s a future on the other side. Take a deep breath.
To create healthy boundaries around stress, the American Psychological Association offers six tips:
Set limits. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, write out all of your responsibilities on a list, and cut back on non-essential ones.
Ask for help. Reach out to friends, family, colleagues, and mentors for guidance and strategies on making life feel more manageable, and don’t be afraid to delegate tasks if you’ve taken on too much.
Make one commitment for your health. When you’re feeling overwhelmed, the idea of adding anything can seem impossible, but even a small change can make an impact. This might be something as minor as committing to cut back on caffeine, or taking a few breaks to go on a walk or practice deep breathing throughout the day.
Get sleep. It’s a vicious cycle: stress can make it hard to fall asleep, while sleep deprivation makes you less resilient in the face of stress. To improve sleep, experts recommend maintaining a consistent sleep schedule, avoiding caffeine, alcohol, and screens before bed, getting exercise (but not right before bed), and keeping your bedroom cool and dark during the hours you’re trying to sleep.
Try to stay positive. Sometimes we worsen our stress by setting impossible standards for ourselves and our work. (I’m definitely guilty of this.) Cut yourself some slack, keeping in mind that you’ll do better work when you’re feeling good. If you find yourself expressing pessimistic opinions more often than not, challenge yourself to reframe your thoughts in more positive light.
Seek professional help. If your stress levels are impacting your focus, mood, or relationships, you may want to schedule an appointment with a therapist. Mental health professionals can work with you to develop strategies for managing stress (and any other issues you’re dealing with), and will be more objective than your friends or family.
I’ve been thinking about the language we use to describe our relationship to time. We spend time. We invest time. If we’re foolish, we waste time; if we’re wise, we budget it. And of course, we long for free time. Notice a theme?
“Time is money,” Benjamin Franklin wrote back in 1748. The famously industrious Franklin didn’t have much use for relaxation, warning that the worker who “goes abroad, or sits idle one half of that day” isn’t just losing the money he spends, but the money he could have made if he’d chosen to work instead.
As the journalist Kyle Chayka points out, Franklin was writing at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. With advances in manufacturing, workers were moving out of their homes and into factories, where “time became money” as they were paid for their hours on the clock rather than the goods they produced.
Politicians and economists alike predicted that as labor became more efficient, working hours would decrease, allowing more time for leisure. In 1910, President Taft recommended that every American be entitled to 2–3 months’ vacation in order to resume the next year’s work with “energy and effectiveness.” In 1930, observing that “technical improvements in manufacture and transport have been proceeding at a greater rate in the last ten years than ever before in history,” the influential British economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that “in our own lifetimes…we may be able to perform all the operations of agriculture, mining, and manufacture with a quarter of the human effort to which we have been accustomed.”
Soon enough, Keynes believed, we’d become so efficient at providing for everyone’s basic needs that our workdays would shrink to three hours at most. With fifteen-hour workweeks, mankind would then have to confront “his permanent problem… how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.”
Keynes was absolutely correct that in the decades to follow, advances in technology, transportation, and manufacturing would grow the global economy many times over. But as almost anyone in the workforce in 2021 knows all too well, his prediction of the 15-hour workweek proved wildly off the mark. It turned out that global enterprise was far more interested in the perpetual drive toward productivity and profit than in “meeting everyone’s basic needs so we can all relax and enjoy an incredible bounty of leisure time.” Today, as we seek out life hacks and productivity apps to squeeze the most out of every minute, it seems we’ve collectively bought into the idea that time is money (and we never have enough of either).
What if instead of thinking of time as a currency, we thought of it as a natural resource? What if, instead of thinking of time as something to spend (or waste, or budget, or maximize), we thought of it as something to experience?
Imagine time like water. We need to use some amount of water for our sustenance and survival: we ingest it to keep ourselves hydrated and healthy; we wash with it to keep ourselves clean. But water is also the source of so many kinds of pleasure, whether it’s sinking down into a hot bath, canoeing down a river, or witnessing the beauty of a waterfall. Think about how different your experience of water is in each of these instances.
Much like water, time is constantly changing shape and form. “Our experience of time varies with whatever we are doing and how we feel about it,” explain brain researchers James M. Broadway and Brittiney Sandoval. Twenty minutes can feel like hours when you’re stuck in conversation with a bore, but those same twenty minutes might feel like mere seconds when you’re racing against a deadline.
“Time does fly when we are having fun,” the researchers say. But that same fun activity will appear to lengthen in time when we recall it later on. This is because of the way the brain encodes memories, registering novel experiences while skipping over familiar or routine ones. “Our retrospective judgment of time is based on how many new memories we create over a certain period,” Broadway and Sandoval explain. “In other words, the more new memories we build on a weekend getaway, the longer that trip will seem in hindsight.”
No matter whether you feel like you’re wasting, saving, minimizing, maximizing, or spending time, you are always experiencing time, all the time. It turns out that if you really want to feel rich in time, the solution isn’t to hack it or try squeezing more productivity from it. Instead, it’s to fill your life with new experiences—ideally experiences that surprise and delight you, that capture your attention and imagination, that your brain will convert into the memories that will become the story of your life.
As the poet Mary Oliver famously wrote:
Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
I was recently catching up with a friend I hadn’t seen in a while. He seemed bothered by something and when I asked about it, he confessed that he was feeling…bored. Bored with work and his social life, to the point where he felt he needed make a big change to get himself out of his rut. Most of us have felt this way at some point in our lives, and we know how uncomfortable and agitating feelings of boredom can be.
But is that such a bad thing? On the one hand, we’ve all heard the derisive adage “only boring people get bored.” But boredom can motivate us to make changes in our lives, and that’s not such a bad thing.
Turns out, scientists have been researching the nature of boredom for years, and their findings support the idea that being bored isn’t actually all that bad. One such scientist is Dr. Sandi Mann of the University of Lancashire in the UK. She and her team published a study in 2014 that looked at how a bored mind responds to creative stimulus. She took two participant groups and had one carry out the exceedingly boring task of writing out a list of phone numbers by hand. She then had both groups complete a creative task: to come up with as many creative uses for two polystyrene cups as they could. Her team found that the group that started the exercise with a boring activity came up with significantly more innovative uses for the cups than their counterparts.
Once you start daydreaming and allow your mind to wander, you start thinking beyond the conscious and into the subconscious.
“Once you start daydreaming and allow your mind to wander, you start thinking beyond the conscious and into the subconscious,” said Dr. Mann during an interview for Nautilus, a science magazine. That’s because when we let ourselves daydream–a common occurrence when we feel bored– we tap into our own cognitive system and begin processing our own internal thoughts, regardless of their relevance to what is happening outside of our heads. While most forms of cognition are responses to external stimulus, boredom-induced daydreaming is the mind working on itself. It helps us think creatively and develop insight into who we are, because what our minds wander to signals our internal mental state.
Boredom can also act as a motivator, as it did for my friend. Andreas Elpidorou, an assistant professor in philosophy at the University of Louisville in Kentucky, has written extensively about the good side of boredom. He argues that boredom encourages one to pursue new goals because it signals that a current goal is not attractive or meaningful. In other words, boredom tells us what we don’t want to do so we can move onto something else.
If boredom makes us more creative and can inspire positive changes in our lives, perhaps it is good for us. And if that’s the case, maybe we don’t need to feel so bad about feeling bored from time to time. Rather than something to be avoided, boredom can be embraced as a mental tool for problem solving, or a strategy for boosting our creativity. If we can do that, we might find we’re not so bored after all.
Need a place to be bored? Book one of our tiny cabins here now.
On a recent sunny afternoon, with the temperature climbing into the 50s for the first time this year, I felt something I haven’t experienced in a long time: joy. Spring in New York is always magical—buds appearing on trees, flowers pushing up from the soil, parks filling with picnickers and joggers—but this year it feels extra special. How could it not? After a long winter and the exhausting pandemic year surrounding it, good things are finally coming. Good things are already here.
March brings us Daylight Saving Time, with its extra hour of evening light, and the first official day of spring. At the time of this writing, the CDC reports that over 81 million Americans have received at least one shot of the Covid-19 vaccine, and over 44 million are now fully vaccinated. We’re not out of the woods yet—public health officials warn that we still have to keep up social distancing and masking precautions in public spaces to avoid the spread of variants—but with every new vaccination, our communities are getting safer and healthier.
If the past year has been about endurance—doing whatever it took to get through—I’d like to propose that we dedicate the coming season to celebration. Lately I’ve been reflecting on the words of the great 20th century theologian and philosopher Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel: “Celebration is an active state, an act of expressing reverence or appreciation…. Celebration is a confrontation, giving attention to the transcendent meaning of one’s actions.”
As adults, we celebrate big milestones like weddings, significant birthdays, and promotions, occasions that feel special in part because they’re rare. But I remember that when I was a kid, so many things felt like cause for genuine celebration: losing a tooth, school letting out for summer break, the thrill of every single birthday. Adults aren’t supposed to get excited about every little thing, right? It’s too earnest, it’s frivolous, it’s embarrassing.
Well, forgive me. This spring, I’m leaning into earnestness. I’m thinking of all the things I merely enjoyed in the past: hugging my mom, having friends over for dinner, seeing live music, traveling somewhere new. Now, I feel almost overwhelmed with gratitude and delight to think about having those things back in my life.
I know I’m not the only one who feels this way. The psychologist and happiness researcher Elizabeth Dunn says that as we emerge from our year of lockdowns, canceled plans, and isolation, we’re likely to experience a “happiness reset,” finding ourselves overjoyed by activities that might’ve seemed like no big deal before. “You can do something pretty simple and it’s going to feel fantastic,” Dunn told The New York Times in a recent interview.
If there’s one thing I appreciate about the past year, it’s the way we’ve been forced to reckon with all the things we once took for granted. These feelings may not last forever, but for as long as they do, I’ll be celebrating.
Ready to celebrate with those who matter most? Book your Getaway today.
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