Surrender
Are you one of those travel planners that has to map out every minute of a trip, review every rating for each hotel, shopping area, museum, restaurant, and attraction prior to a vacation, to make sure that it turns out perfectly, exactly as you planned?
I am.
Or should I say, I was.
Maybe this comes from years of vacationing as a kid in Disney World, where if we hadn’t planned every ride, every FastPass, and every meal reservation down to the minute, we were told we’d miss out on the best parts of our vacation.
Luckily, I was never the one who had to plan those vacations, I was just along for the ride. My mom (and later, my sister) would take care of the details. If I asked why I needed to know in March whether I wanted to eat with Mickey or Princess Jasmine on Thursday, July 14, I got an earful.
Did I want our vacation to turn into one of those horror stories of families who had simply shown up in Orlando with no plans on the books, waiting in line in 90-degree heat for three hours for one 80-second ride, then trudging to the next ride to wait another hour or two for a similar-duration attraction? Did I want to miss dining with Winnie-the-Pooh or Mary Poppins because we didn’t plan ahead?
Of course not, silly old bear.
You’ve seen the frazzled families: screaming toddlers - sweaty and miserable, older brothers and sisters whining and threatening temper tantrums, overwhelmed parents on the verge of their own meltdowns. It makes me uncomfortable just thinking of it.
But that wasn’t us.
We were up at dawn, on the monorail, standing at the front of the line to be the first in the park when they lowered the ropes, running from attraction to attraction in the early morning to jump on the best rides with no lines before the FastPasses (reserved three months in advance) kicked in, getting the most out of our vacation.
I admit there is a certain thrill in beating the crowds and getting the best value out of the trip, but sometimes the planning seems exhausting and not like a vacation at all.
I often took the same approach for other vacations in which I did most of the planning, and I found myself mapping out the days, deciding how long to stay at each museum or attraction, and not leaving much down time for the world to surprise me. Those vacations were wonderful, but again, exhausting.
As I’ve been reading more and more about surrender and working on the mantra “let go and let God,” I wondered whether I could really surrender a vacation to God/Spirit/Universe/Creator, and allow its wisdom, joy, and goodwill to take care of me. I’d been really wanting to vacation in Greece (which I’d never visited) and which would normally be an international trip that I would plan to the nth degree. I decided that I was going to try to “surrender” instead of micro-manage. I would stay energized by meditating and aligning with all that is good instead of worrying about everything that could go wrong and what I could do to avoid that happening. It was a risk, I knew.
My Questions Were:
1. Would I be disappointed?
2. Would everything go wrong because I hadn’t planned?
3. Would my vacation be a nightmare without a set of exhaustive preparations?
4. Would the whole adventure be an epic fail?
It was an interesting experiment, and something that I had never attempted in the past, but I was willing to give it a try. Even Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure gave me a bit of encouragement that maybe my planning didn’t “measure up” to what God (or heaven) could do:
“Man, proud man, drest in a little brief authority, most ignorant of what he’s most assur d, glassy essence, like an angry ape, plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven, as make the angels weep.”
Stay tuned next week for the details, and in the meantime, try a little letting go and letting God! See what happens and let me know!
Also, are you a planner or a “wing-it” kind of vacationer? I’d love to hear your stories about how you travel!
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