It’s bank holiday weekend!
The Dorset Coast, when I live, is a popular visitor destination and I’ve long ago learned from the locals that it’s best to avoid travelling locally on bank holiday weekends.
But yesterday I took a chance. And got caught in a traffic jam. It wasn’t a long one – just about 15 mins and in beautiful surroundings – so it gave me a chance to more closely admire the countryside I normally whiz through at 60 mph.
One extra day off
It also gave me food for thought and conversation. We have just 8 bank holidays here in the UK. This is fewer than many countries: Spain has 14 and Italy 16. India has just 3 ‘national’ holidays though you can get other days off depending on your religion.
Probably because there are so few of them, people tend to try to do too much on bank holiday weekends. In their millions, they cram cars with humans and their belongings and head for the hills, the countryside and the seaside to …
…relax
…have a break
…recharge their batteries!
Let’s get a quart into a point pot
Yes, in their millions… all together… they pile onto already overcrowded roads. Acting as if they have a week off work. But we have just three non-working days instead of the usual two.
We have one extra day off work. And you cannot cram a week’s activity into that one extra day. Yet the attitude is ‘it’s a bank holiday so we must hurry somewhere with everyone else to relax and have a great time.
All together now…
Here in on the Dorset Coast we get to see how they go about this frenetic relaxing and recharging.
The cars, crammed with people and their surfing and cycling and sailing gear, begin arriving Friday afternoon through Saturday morning. They begin leaving on Monday afternoon. And as they all do it at the same time many spend lots of their one-day-extra weekend in traffic hold-ups.
“You must relax”
I’ve got a self help book with the great title “You must relax”. It was written by Edmund Jacobson and published in 1957.
It’s not a book I’d bother rushing out and buying, by the way. I saw it in a second hand book shop years ago and bought it because of the wonderfully contradictory title. And the title often comes to mind when I see people frantically trying to ‘relax and recharge’ – trying to fit too much into too little time and not seeming to enjoy it very much.
Relax means relax
Relax means chill out and take a break. And this can include doing something different like swimming, or cycling, or surfing or sailing, go hill-walking.
But ‘you must relax’ is where the problem arises. The attitude of urgency. From the NLP Meta Model we know that ‘must’ is a Rule word – it’s a have-to term. It’s amazing that the writer, or the publishers of the book, admittedly written before NLP was invented, didn’t recognise the irony of putting must and relax together in this way.
Must implies urgency and pressure – relax suggests letting go of pressure.
Guess what we did at the weekend?
When I worked in London a big part of the weekend activities and, especially how we spent bank holiday weekends, was doing things so that you could impress your colleagues when you arrived back at work with what a fantastic action-packed weekend you had – and with how you valiantly dodged or endured the traffic hold-ups.
Yet, although I loved getting out of London at weekends, I invariably stayed there on bank holiday weekends.
Because that was when London seemed to chill out; that was when you could really explore a lovely city in peace and quiet. When the frantic people had left to chill out and relax in the countryside or by the sea and the chilled out people stayed behind to … chill out.