When you start to quote from the infinite wisdom of… Peppa Pig, you know you’ve been watching cartoons with your kids for too long… (Ok, ok, you got me, I love Peppa Pig since before I had kids, and I don’t care who disapproves!) Thing is, Daddy Pig was spot on with that one because every now and then, I find myself getting to the same conclusion…
The best holiday we ever had was on Manitoulin Island. Now, let me put things into a bit of perspective: I have lived in Ireland for a few years and even in Canada it’s been a decade, also visited France and other places in Europe, but this… this one is special. It’s such a natural display of different sides of beautiful, that months later after being there, it makes you daydream and long to go back.
The crazy pace of this century, the flood of technology and information gets me tired, and beside the effort of keeping up with the existence of it all, these last few years I’ve had to add on the effort to distinguishing between real and filters, photo-shopped and genuine and I find all that a bit revolting.
So, after a year of work and noise and city and issues and just… life, we ended up on this little quiet island, where at every turn there was a poster-like image.
I still struggle to find a word to describe the color of that water, so clear and fresh,
kissing the feet of a white lighthouse,
surrounded by the glorious Canadian trees…
the rocks and rapids make you ask yourself if maybe you’re at Ireland’s Bridal Veils Falls,
the wilderness of some swamps you drive by takes you back to Wuthering Heights and Heathcliff,
then you decide to have lunch and there is one place that is THE local restaurant and it has this view:
Its almost mystic, the cabin in the woods, with the caramel beach in the backyard, with BLUE crabs and the closest neighbours a few miles away…
In the morning you have your coffee with this view
looking for reasons to get back to civilization but can’t find many…
We had Internet and phones and other distractions, but somehow from the oldest to the youngest we were drawn to the nature and it’s blissfulness. I remember being shocked about how pitch dark it gets at night, and how calm and steady life went on, even with several hours of a power blackout due to maintenance. Nobody got angry about it, hardly even noticing the outage. We did things like we used to do when we were kids, driving around and finding a clearing full of flowers and decided to stop there, but nothing is common, not even a stop…
It all sounds like a commercial, I know, but the point is beyond the gorgeous sights. I don’t really understand this need to do stuff, the multitude of things we choose to fill our minds with, we let ourselves get distracted from life and living, we look to our life and nothing is good enough or pretty enough and we add color and filters and modify it all for the rest of the world to see, and we inside we remain grumpy and stressed and rushed, developing ulcers, cancers and setting ourselves for heart attacks and short miserable lives.
There is this competition to look successful and we can’t enjoy anything anymore unless its perfectly exposed on social media. What if we took holidays where we do NOTHING? Just get back close to yourself, your dreams, your possibilities. Remember who you are, who you used to dream to be, get close to the ones around you.
I miss when people used to analyze each other, just notice the way your kids eyes light up when you sit and gather pebbles with them, or the way the wind blows into the hair of the one you love, the way a smile changes the whole expression on a face, the sun rising and setting simply for your eyes. Not everyday is a competition, and if it is, and the race is to live and be happy, then, sometimes to do nothing makes you the winner!
