Anne Giles Clelland

What I Learned on My Summer Vacation from My BlackBerry

No amount of thumbing the tiny track ball through email on my new pink BlackBerry turned up a single mission critical action item. 

If we use figures of a seven-day vacation for two, including airfare, hotels, and meals costing $2100, hours awake at 16, then every vacation hour costs $18.75, or about $20 per hour.

A $20 vacation hour spent reading and answering email on the BlackBerry was like sitting still in a taxi with the meter running and not even looking out the window.

As a start-up company leader, creation and connection energize me.  Tedious managerial tasks leave me weary.  In the latter category, entering data into QuickBooks comes to mind.  Doing email on a BlackBerry without access to my creative tools on a laptop - Microsoft Word and TypePad foremost among them - ended up being a tedious managerial task.  On vacation, then, I brought the very least invigorating part of my work with me.

Having the Internet in my pocket was a different story.

While I love vacation, I love the people already in my life, too.  I missed them while I was gone.  “What are you doing?” was the question I most wanted to ask.  That answer is on Twitter and my BlackBerry called up my text-based Twitter stream quickly and readily.  Since I’m still a slow BlackBerry typist, I didn’t correspond with the people I follow, but I felt very comforted that, while I was missing them, I wasn’t missing everything they were doing.

And Twitter was my one creative outlet.  Letting a picture be worth a thousand words, I took a photo or got one taken here and there, mostly blurry - I’ll learn - wanting to share my wild and crazy vacation with people who care - and sent a TwitPic with an inexpertly typed caption.  I found it often quite moving to send them.  More than the “Wish you were here” postcard sentiment, I was feeling, “Oh, l so want to share this with you.”

To find out how Lance Armstrong was doing in the Tour de France, did I access the slow-loading, vacation-minute-dollars-are-ticking-away Versus.com?  Nope, I called up Lance’s Twitter stream and found out from him myself.

“Where is that restaurant/theater/hotel/museum?”  Google.  'Nough said.

My last vacation was two years ago and the next may well be two years from now.  While I understand that founding a company assigned me the fiduciary responsibility of being available to it 24-7 - I can’t sometimes lead a company, and sometimes not lead it - for my next vacation, I will leave these words in my email auto-responder:

"Call me."

A Sabbatical from Force

Today, I grant myself an entrepreneur’s one-year leave of absence from what I seek and what I love outside of my start-up.

The angst of having too little time and too few resources takes my mind and heart away from passion for my idea and my execution of it as a business.  That feels like force against flow.

I’ve had them.  I will have them again.  For one year, I relinquish:

Adornment

I love decorating myself in fine clothing, silk scarves, gold jewelry, tinted, sharp hairstyles, kohl eyeliner.  Newly.  In my mind, Cher and Sara Jessica Parker embody the possibilities for exquisite and exotic attire.  I have loved shoes but find them less interesting since I’ve opted for comfort in flats rather than flair in heels.

I love setting a nice table with fine china, cloth napkins, flowers, arranging new ornaments on table tops, matching towels, shaped soaps.

I miss shopping.  I had not realized how stimulating I found the colors and textures, the array and arrangement of goods, the recreation of simply being there and gazing.  I bought rarely and carefully, but I loved to look.  Not having the power to buy turns the looking into longing.

For one year, I will use my dollars to adorn my company, not myself or my house.  Although I feel faded at times, I can make do with what I have.

Scholarship

As an entrepreneur, I am learning, but it feels haphazard, unsystematic.  Achieving business acumen doesn’t feel like an intellectual pursuit.  I miss tomes and systematic acquisition of expertise in a discipline through study.  I miss synthesizing the ideas and words of the great thinkers into meaning for myself.  I miss the vitality of philosophy.  The reading and writing and mind time this takes?  Ah, well.

Books

I have collected them since I was a child.  Ten moves in ten years pared my stacks to a core.  Even they sit un-opened.  With a book club choice thrown in and an occasional must-know business book, no reading and buying of books for one year.  Peace.

Salary

O, I was a kept woman when I had a salary!  I had no idea of the luxury and security of the roomy container of someone else valuing my work and paying my way for it.  I could treat the whole table to a meal, donate to charities, buy an adornment, buy cat toys and cat trees.  Ah, well.

Spiritual Path

I struggle spiritually.  I had pieced together enough of a spiritual hovel in Tampa to feel a little peace, a little safety, while I continued to thrash.  I’ve been back in my hometown almost three years.  Striving to find a place, the people, a practice is wearing me out.  Enough.  I’ve put it down and picked it up again many times before.  I can do that again.

Order

Let’s see, move ten times in eleven years, return to your hometown, fall in love with a guy, decide to marry him, pack and pare one more time, bring together the lives of two mature adults and two mature female cats, then start two corporations.  The best place for the clean laundry is the dining room table.  One cat also finds it a best place.  Peace.

Mandatory Culturally Designated Rituals

Trying to fill all roles and meet all expectations and be all things to all people according to a nationally decreed holiday calendar has become beyond bearing.  I haven’t yet replied to Christmas cards.  For one year, I gather with my friends and family by heart, not by date.

Force has wrung joy from my days.  Let the flow of what I can truly be and do as an entrepreneur, unhindered by trying to make things happen, begin.