A few days from now, the unofficial end of Summer – the day after Labor Day – arrives. Perhaps that causes you to let out a big sigh…one of sadness, one of relief, or one of joy.
I imagine you know this feeling, the one that comes upon you at some point after a long trip. It’s a mixture of elation, exhaustion, sadness, and overwhelm, with a touch of longing added in too. The suitcase is still half-emptied on the bedroom floor two days after you pull into your driveway. There’s a pile of mail on the counter you haven’t sorted. You spent 90 minutes or more picking up the dog from the kennel, the final expense of the trip (except for the credit card bills that will come). The fridge needs groceries, and sometime soon you have to answer the personal and work emails that piled up while you were gone. The kids are done being around you and have disappeared into the neighborhood. The tan is already fading…and to some degree, so is the memory of the trip itself.
It’s a strange kind of letdown, because the trip itself was good. Maybe it was really delightful, the kind of week that reminded you what rest feels like, or brought your family closer, or gave you a few days where the world felt bigger than your inbox. But now you’re standing in a laundry room at 9 p.m. on a Saturday, sorting whites from darks, wondering where all of that went.
Here’s the thing, though: it didn’t go anywhere. Keeping it all going, at full intensity, was never really the plan. Nobody comes home from vacation and tries to live permanently in vacation mode, unless perhaps you’re super wealthy and retired. You unpack. You go back to work or parenting or whatever. That’s not failure. That’s just what coming home is.
The Same Letdown, but a Different Trip
If you’ve ever come back from a powerful retreat, sat with a sermon that nudged you in a new direction, or worked through a book or resource (like our forthcoming Belonging to the Earth Field Guide) and felt something shift in how you think about creation and your place in it, you’ve probably felt a version of this same letdown. The high doesn’t last. Within a week…or sometimes a day…you’re immersed in the ordinary demands of your life. The clarity you felt starts to feel far away. It’s almost embarrassing, like something you can’t quite explain to people who weren’t there.
I’ve had the good fortune of going on many incredibly powerful trips in my lifetime. College trips to Haiti, El Salvador, and Zimbabwe forced me to see that there’s a very different world from the one I grew up in. A trip to Israel brought sacred texts to life for me in a new way. A men’s retreat at Whiterock Conservancy helped me through a very challenging time in my personal life. But while each of those experiences continues to shape me, the reality is I carry just a few puzzle pieces into the future, not the whole.
In my own experience, I’m tempted to read that fade as proof that the experiences didn’t really take. Maybe I wasn’t as moved as I thought I was, or the resolve wasn’t as real as it felt in the moment. But I’ve learned that’s the wrong lesson. The fading isn’t the failure. Trying to hold onto the whole experience, at full intensity, indefinitely, is what actually burns people out. That’s true whether we’re talking about a vacation or a call to care for creation. Nobody can sustain a life on the emotional peak of a single week. The people who keep going are the ones who stop trying to.
What Actually Lasts
Think about your own vacations, the ones from years ago. You probably don’t remember the whole itinerary anymore, but you probably do remember one or two specific things. Perhaps there’s a recipe you got from a B&B that you still make. Maybe there’s a piece of art you picked up that still inspires you. There’s probably an inside joke that still gets you and your spouse laughing years later. If you’re fortunate, you’re still connected to someone you called the second you landed, because you needed someone who’d actually understand what the week had been like.
You didn’t bring the whole trip home, just a piece or two of it. Those pieces are still with you, quietly built into your ordinary life, long after the rest faded.
That’s true of this work you and I are doing, too–this work to protect this fragile planet. You’re not going to carry the full emotional weight of a retreat, a sermon, or a book we recommended that you read forever. You won’t have the same intensity you felt reading the last page or driving home from the conference. That’s not the goal, and chasing it is a good way to burn out fast.
The goal is smaller, and much more doable: What’s the one thing, or maybe two, that you’re actually willing to unpack and keep, knowing you’ll add to that list later?
Maybe it’s a single habit, or a conversation you finally have with your congregation’s property committee. Maybe it’s just the name of one person you know you can call when this all feels like too much to carry alone. Perhaps it’s the openness to finally share the boxes of unused stuff in your basement with others, as a way of living gratefully and focusing on a simpler way of being human.
You really don’t have to hold onto everything. Unpack something, and then actually put it somewhere it’ll stay.
That’s enough to start with, and it always has been.